Intranet Screen Shot: Home Page

Click on the screen shot above to see it larger in a new window. This is the corporate Intranet homepage that I designed, built, deployed and maintained as AMD Intranet webmaster. It served as the desktop standard homepage for all employees and was the first page they saw each day when launching their browser.

There are a couple of different elements to the page that were standard across the site, and evident of the user-centered design principles in action:

1. Navigation bar that included most visited site links AND the two most popular web tools, the search engine and the online phonebook. So in addition to providing links to the most popular hub pages on every page, (home, news, forms, departments, and amd.com) employees could also accomplish their most common online activities from anywhere on the site.

2. Standardized navigation menus (right below the search fields) that provide links to the sub-sites and pages, and offer a preview of the "bread crumbing" format that users would see on content pages. An example of the menus is below (click on it to see it bigger):


The content areas of the page were wire-framed into 5 different sections:

1. "Features"- Left hand rail of the page, this area is used to feature new or important sites on the intranet. Optimally these links would be featured for about a week, sometimes two depending on availability of new content. Required to feature a graphical element as well as a short blurb describing the site and its importance.

2. "What's New" - the main content area of the page, was populated by stories, announcements or links of importance and provided by the Internal Communications editorial staff. The articles would consist of messages and announcements from the CEO or other officers, product features and stories and employee features. New stories were required on a daily basis, and with an optimal target or three stories with a max of four, each story would be on the home page no more than 3-4 business days. Stories would still be accessible from the main "news" page, accessible via the "More" or "News" links.

3. "Press Releases" - Pretty self-explanatory, all press releases would be posted here as they happened and the content would cycle out based on how prolific the PR team was feeling that week.

4. "Stock Chart" - this was a "real-time/20 min delay" feed we paid a third party vendor to provide a quick and easy glance at how the stock fared in the market that day. Was very popular among employees, who very conscientious about letting me know when the feed was broken (i.e. I would get flooded with calls and emails about it within minutes).

5. "Key Resources" - yes I intentionally put something called "key resources" in a section of the page that eye-tracking usability studies have shown is the least often looked at area of any page. Why would I do such a thing? Because it was a political compromise. These sites are those that higher ups in the company insisted needed home page visibility AT ALL TIMES, despite that our guidelines, best practices, and usability studies might say otherwise. So I used this area of the home page to make powerful people happy without occupying the more valuable real estate of the home page. Shhhh don't tell them. ;-)