The web usability experts at the Nielsen Norman Group have awarded silverorange in their Intranet Design Annual: Best Intranets of 2003.

In 2001, silverorange won the top honours in the NNG report and received an award from Jakob Nielsen at the User Experience Conference in 2001. This year, silverorange was awarded an honorable mention for excellent redesign of a previously winning intranet and our intranet was featured along with the ten other winners in the report.

The 2003 report was authored by Jakob Nielsen (described by the New York Times as “the guru of web usability”), Kara Pernice Coyne, and Candice Goodwin. The authors of the report praised the third version of The silverorange Intranet and explained their decision:

“In our first design annual in 2001, we selected ten winners and from them, one best intranet — silverorange. Now, two years later, this same company has produced yet another excellent intranet, its third version, that we feel deserves a very honorable mention among this reports winners.”

“This team not only devised an excellent intranet once, winning our 2001 Intranet Design Annual, but has now created a very different but equally superb design. If you have a great design, don’t change it just for the sake of change. But, as silverorange shows, if it is time to transform your intranet, going all out can really pay off.”

The authors also pointed out several improvements from the previous design that particularly caught their attention:

“The new designs look has changed from the orange theme of 2001 to a more subdued one with blues and grays. The navigational elements, though also changed, are still very understandable, making use of tabs and obvious links. All in all, the new intranet design is an impressive revision that's worthy of the original.”

“A feature that most caught our attention in 2001 was the ability to not only post photos to the intranet, but to crop or resize them there without additional tools. Users love this. This feature got a facelift in the new design.”

You can purchase a copy of the report at the Nielsen Norman Group site. Learn more about the silverorange intranet and how it can help your organization communicate more effectively and more efficiently.