Nielsen Norman Group has named Lifespan’s employee intranet one of the ten best in the world in its 2023 Intranet Design Annual.
Lifespan is Rhode Island’s largest health system, with more than 16,000 employees. The intranet serves all of them, at over a million page views a month.
Eighteen Months, and What They Went Into
The build took eighteen months of employee-focused strategy, research, design, testing and development — the majority of it spent before any interface existed.
A hospital intranet fails in a particular way. It becomes a filing cabinet for the organizations that own the content rather than a tool for the people who need it, and the staff who need something during a shift learn to ask a colleague instead. Avoiding that outcome is a research problem first: what people actually look for, when, and on which device, and how much of it they can find in the time they actually have.
About the Award
Nielsen Norman Group has evaluated web and application usability since 2001. Its Intranet Design Annual selects ten winners worldwide each year; past honorees include IBM, JetBlue, BNY Mellon and Princeton University. The ten are published without ranking.
About Pare
Pare is an AI-native digital consultancy, founded in 2007 as Oomph and rebuilt in 2026 for the AI age. The firm builds websites, platforms, and digital products — and the intelligence inside them — for the organizations people depend on most. Its healthcare practice spans hospital systems, academic medical centers and clinical professional societies.
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