The default home to 16,000 Google employees is Moma, the given name for the Google intranet. Moma’s mission: “Organize Google’s information and make it accessible and useful to Googlers.”

The Google intranet home page, with key content ‘greyed-out’

What the Google Intranet Looks Like is a case study look at the Google intranet, written by unofficial Google Bloggers Philipp Lenssen & Tony Ruscoe:

“On the top of the Google intranet homepage, you’ll find the logo reading “Moma - Inside Google.” Next to it is a search box allowing you to find information from Moma in general, information on specific Google employees, information on availability of meeting rooms, building maps and more. You can choose to include secure content or not via a checkbox. Another checkbox offers you to use “Moma NEXT" for a more experimental variant of search results.

 

To the top right, there’s an option to switch to iMoma, an iGoogle-style tool prepared by the company which allows further customization of the intranet start page. This way, employees may be able to select their own news and service widgets of interest to be displayed when they log-in.

 

The actual content of the homepage in the picture is split up into 4 columns. To the left, there’s a “My Office” section, with information for employees and a way to choose your own office for more relevant links. It’s followed by the sections “Survival Kit” and “My shortcuts.” In the middle columns, news gadgets are headlined “Welcome to Google!,” “Communications,” “HR” (human resources), “Company Info” and “Internal Google news,” all in common soft shades of Google base colors. The right column is listing Google teams."

This is a very limited, scatter-shot case study but it has some interesting screens.

The Official Google Enterprise Blog provides some insight into Google’s own intranet search engine with a sanitized screenshot of the search results produced on Moma.

On a side note... Lessen & Roscoe say that a lot of Google employees don’t use Google’s own social networking site, and instead prefer to use Facebook…. Oh well, follow the leader J

MORE INTRANET CASE STUDIES:

Intranet case study: HP

Intranet case study: British Airways intranet

Intranet case study: Canon Australia

Intranet case study: Atomic Energy Employee Portal

Intranet case study: Fidelity Investments (webinar)

Intranet portal case study: Vanguard Group Intranet

Intranet case study: McDonald’s Intranet

Intranet case study: SimCorp

Best practices case study: Sodexho USA

Intranet case study: Lowe & Partners

Intranet case study: Intrawest Placemaking

Intranet Case Study: Ericsson Group

Intranet case study: Perkins Eastman

Leading intranet case study: IBM’s W3

Intranet portal case study:

Intranet case study: General Motors (GM)

Canon Australia has an extensive portal-based intranet, known as iCON, for a number of years. As detailed in a very thorough case study from Australia’s Step Two Designs “the intranet continued to grow and expand, eventually being given the mandate to deliver to a diverse range of audiences, including both internal and external users (effectively creating an extranet).

Canon Australia intranet portal (wireframe)

“This widening of the audience prompted a re-evaluation of the intranet, with the goal of ensuring that the site is effective in meeting the needs of current and future users (see Intranet redesign for Canon Australia).”

In mid-2006, Canon sought the assistance of Step Two Designs to begin the process of evaluating and redesigning iCON.

The redesign project consisted of two phases: needs analysis and redesign. The analysis included:

·         interviews with a variety of staff

·         stakeholders ‘alignment’ workshop

·         analysis of usage data

·         heuristic inspection of the current site

·         task analysis

Key issues identified in the analysis and driving the redesign included those that are common to many enterprise intranets:

·         Inconsistent employee use

·         Frontline staff lack key information

·         Information is difficult to find

·         Organizational silos block information sharing

“Once the site structure had been finalized and tested, page layouts (or ‘wireframes’)

were prepared for key pages, including the home page, key navigation pages, content pages, and other special pages (such as search results),” writes Step Two’s Patrick Kennedy, a user experience specialist.

“Wireframes aim to convey the content and functionality of a site, without applying the full visual design. Whilst some aspects will change as the visual design is developed (and implemented) the finished site should reflect the wireframes at its core because they are based on usability principles, and more importantly, the needs analysis that was conducted.”

Departing from the ‘traditional’ home page intranet design Canon is rolling out a personalized home page.

This is a very well done case study from Step Two which you can read in full: Intranet redesign for Canon Australia