The direct answer to this post’s title is that they certainly do. The unexpected thing is that they do it in a very specific manner.
It would seem that the larger an organization is, the more likely it is to launch a custom intranet design addressing its requirements in terms of usability, driving user engagement, and fitting specific business needs. However, only two (sic!) respondents said they decided to implement a custom design according to their corporate guidelines while others were satisfied with the ready-made templates and only leveraged the opportunity to make a basic customization by inserting their logos, slogans and color schemes.
This fact clearly illustrates that small and medium-sized businesses concentrate on core intranet features. They do count every dollar invested in the solution and don’t worry too much how the intranet appearance may contribute to the business performance. They are unlikely to bother themselves with how the opening page looks, whether it should be scrolled down or not, or whether the intranet meets adopted design guidelines.
In our experience, SMBs start with basic features like document sharing, internal communications, workgroup collaboration, time planning and calendaring. Later they expand their intranet practice with step-by-step adoption of more features, but they rarely care about the design! One of the respondents told me privately that since the intranet is for internal purposes it doesn’t need to be better than it is – there are no customers to attract. What SMBs need is to accomplish internal tasks in a way that brings real value to the business.
