I see that web site usability guru, Jakob Neilsen, just published his list of the "Ten Best Intranets of 2005" . Among them, is Cisco which he says: " is particularly remarkable because its sales-support intranet application was among the 2001 winners. This year, Cisco won for its overall intranet design.
Quantifying productivity gains from improved web site and intranet design are fundamental to the use of new media, and according to Neilsen it "requires a formal benchmarking study, which few organizations bother conducting. Thus, even good intranet teams usually don't have complete estimates of how much money they save their organizations."
"Cisco," says Neilsen, "is one of the rare exceptions. The company's intranet team collected time-on-task measurements for employees using the old and new intranet designs to perform fifteen representative tasks. Overall, the average task took 17.6 seconds less with the new design. When considering total intranet usage, this faster performance saves Cisco $3 million per year simply from the reduced time it takes employees to navigate from the intranet homepage to a subsite. The gains from improving subsite usability will probably be even greater."
So often I get asked how a communications team can demonstrate the value of PR. Building in metrics, testing before,after, and on an ongoing basis is one effective means to do so. I suspect Cisco communications would agree.
Other winners include:
- Banco Español de Crédito (Banesto), the third largest bank in Spain
- Electrolux, the world's largest manufacturer of powered appliances (Sweden)
- The Integer Group, the seventh largest promotional marketing agency (U.S.)
- NedTrain, the Dutch National Railway's maintenance subsidiary (The Netherlands)
- Orbis Technology, a small software developer (U.K.)
- Park Place Dealerships, operator of ten luxury automobile dealerships (U.S.)
- Procter & Gamble, a leading manufacturer of branded consumer goods (U.S.)
- Schematic, an interactive design and technology agency (U.S.)
- Verizon Communications, a leading telecommunications company (U.S.)
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