SharePoint Intranet Design: Best Practices That Drive Adoption

Good SharePoint intranet design starts with what employees need to find and do, not with what the organisation wants to broadcast. When intranet projects disappoint, it is usually because the pages look nothing like the company brand, the navigation mirrors the org chart rather than how people look for information, and the homepage leads with corporate announcements that few people read.

Why start with user research rather than SharePoint?

ThinkShare applies user-centred design to every SharePoint intranet we build. Before a single page is built we run card sorting, tree testing and user interviews, so the information architecture and navigation are tested with real employees before implementation begins. That saves rework later and gives you a site people actually use.

How should SharePoint intranet navigation be structured?

Good SharePoint intranet navigation is task-based. People look for things like "book a room", "submit an expense" or "find a policy", not "visit HR" or "go to Finance". We design navigation around real employee tasks and the way people think about them, and test it with a representative group of users before anything is built in SharePoint.

How do user personas help intranet design?

Every ThinkShare intranet project includes user personas, profiles of the employees who will use the intranet every day, based on what we learn in research. A typical persona might describe an office manager who is often not kept in the loop, struggles to find the right resources quickly and misses key news because she is juggling too many tasks. Her goal is to manage administrative tasks, keep on top of schedules and stay up to date with the latest policies, and the intranet has to be designed around that rather than around a senior leadership wishlist.

Personas keep design decisions grounded in what employees need rather than in internal assumptions. When there is a debate about whether a link belongs in the top navigation or on a department page, the persona answers it, not internal politics.

Why use wireframes before visual design?

Before any SharePoint configuration starts, we produce wireframes, simple page layouts that define the structure of each key page type. Wireframes are reviewed and approved before visual design begins, so decisions about structure are made separately from decisions about look and feel. It avoids the expensive situation where pages are built in SharePoint, the layout turns out to be wrong and they have to be rebuilt.

Visual design then applies your brand to SharePoint's components: colours, fonts, image styles and icons that make the intranet feel like part of your organisation. You get two rounds of design revisions as standard, so the finished site reflects your brand and what your employees expect.

What makes a good intranet homepage?

The homepage is the most important page to get right. It has to show the most important content for the widest range of employees while staying uncluttered. We design homepages that lead with targeted news (filtered by role, location or department where that helps), quick links to the tools and policies people use most, and a people section that helps colleagues connect with each other.

The homepage should never be the only route to content. Employees should be able to complete their most common tasks within two clicks, and we check that through usability testing before launch.

What results have clients seen?

March, a group of manufacturing and engineering businesses formed from three brands, needed one place to centralise information that had been spread across disparate systems. We started with discovery workshops with their key stakeholders, built a mock-up of the homepage on SharePoint Online, then produced wireframes of the main pages before building. The finished intranet includes a custom Training Academy, using Microsoft Forms to connect employees with the right training, and a wellbeing area, and it gives every employee, on site, off site, in the office or remote, one platform for the information they need. The March case study has the detail.

We have also designed a separate out-of-the-box intranet for each business in a group of companies, linked by a shared group-wide engagement platform.

When Cobalt Housing launched their intranet, 93% of colleagues accessed it in the first week, and Cobalt told us "colleagues have shared their praise for the design, structure, and capability of the Intranet."

If you are still on SharePoint Server or a legacy intranet platform, design improvements on their own may not be enough. Migrating to SharePoint Online should come first, so the new intranet is built on a modern, supported platform.

What support is there after launch?

Intranet design is not a one-off activity. As the organisation changes, with new teams, rebrands and different working patterns, the intranet needs to change with it. ThinkShare offers SharePoint support packages covering technical support, governance reviews, UX design reviews and new page and template creation. Your content editors get a named ThinkShare contact rather than a generic helpdesk queue, which keeps the design quality up over time.

Frequently asked questions

How long does SharePoint intranet design take?

It depends on the size of the intranet and how much research you want. Discovery, information architecture, wireframes and two rounds of visual design typically take a few weeks before build begins. A pre-built intranet with a lighter design phase can be live in around a month, as it was for Youth Futures Foundation.

How much does a designed SharePoint intranet cost?

ThinkShare's pre-built SharePoint intranet costs £12,500 for up to 100 users and £17,500 for up to 500 users, with a quote for larger organisations. A bespoke design with full user research costs more, depending on the number of page types and integrations. We give a fixed quote once we understand the scope.

Can SharePoint be branded without custom code?

Yes. SharePoint Online supports custom themes, logos, header and footer options and page layouts built from standard web parts, which covers a lot of branding needs without custom development. Custom web parts or an intranet product such as Omnia come in when you need layouts and features beyond that.

Do smaller organisations need user research?

Even a small amount helps. A short survey and a handful of interviews will show you which tasks matter most, and a quick tree test will tell you whether people can find things in the navigation you have planned. It costs far less than redesigning an intranet nobody uses.

What is the difference between SharePoint and Omnia for intranet design?

Omnia is an intranet product that runs on SharePoint and stores its content there, with its own interface, templates and communications features on top. Plain SharePoint gives you a clean, modern intranet with less to manage. We implement both and recommend based on the size of your organisation and what your communications team needs.

Talk to us

If you want an intranet your employees will use, get in touch or read more about our SharePoint intranet services.