The most common reason intranet projects fail is not technical — it is design. Pages that look nothing like the company brand, navigation that mirrors the org chart rather than how people actually look for information, and homepages that lead with corporate announcements nobody reads.
ThinkShare applies user-centred design to every SharePoint intranet we build, starting with what employees need to find and do — not what leadership wants to broadcast. We conduct card sorting, tree testing, and user interviews before a single SharePoint page is built. The output is an information architecture and navigation design validated before implementation begins, saving significant rework time and producing a site people actually use.
Good SharePoint intranet navigation is task-based. Users look for things like "book a room", "submit an expense", or "find a policy" — not "visit HR" or "go to Finance". ThinkShare designs navigation to reflect real employee tasks and mental models, validated through tree testing with a representative user sample before a single page is built in SharePoint.
Every ThinkShare intranet project includes the creation of user personas — research-grounded profiles of the employees who will use the intranet daily. A typical persona might describe an Office Manager who is not always kept in the loop as a priority, struggles to find the correct resources quickly, and misses key news because she is managing too many tasks simultaneously. Her goal is to access the intranet to manage administrative tasks, oversee schedules, and stay updated on the latest policies — and the intranet must be designed around that reality, not around a senior leadership wishlist.
Personas ensure that design decisions are grounded in genuine employee needs rather than internal assumptions. When a design debate arises — should this link appear in the top navigation or within a department page? — the answer comes from the persona, not from internal politics. This approach consistently produces intranets with higher adoption rates and more sustained usage than those designed without user research.
Before any SharePoint configuration begins, ThinkShare produces wireframes — low-fidelity page layouts that define the structure of each key page type. Wireframes are reviewed and approved before visual design begins, ensuring that structural decisions are made separately from aesthetic ones. This prevents the common failure mode of building pages in SharePoint, deciding the layout is wrong, and having to rebuild from scratch at significant cost to the project timeline.
Visual design then translates your brand into SharePoint's component model — colours, fonts, image styles, and iconography that make the intranet feel like a natural extension of your organisation's identity. ThinkShare delivers two rounds of design revisions as standard, ensuring the finished site genuinely reflects your brand and your employees' expectations.
The intranet homepage is the most critical page to get right. It must surface the most important content for the broadest range of employees while remaining uncluttered and visually engaging. ThinkShare designs homepages that lead with targeted news (filtered by role, location, or department where appropriate), quick links to the most commonly accessed tools and policies, and a people section that reinforces organisational connection. The homepage should never be the only route to content — employees should be able to complete their most common tasks within two clicks, a target ThinkShare validates through usability testing before launch.
ThinkShare has delivered SharePoint intranets for Scottish Government, Edwin James, OBG Group, Zero Waste Scotland, British Cycling, and many other UK organisations. Edwin James — an 800-user multi-disciplinary engineering services company with no existing intranet — received a fully designed SharePoint intranet and Learning Academy, plus Viva Engage for community engagement. OBG Group required five out-of-the-box intranets, one per enterprise, connected by a group-wide engagement platform.
Client feedback consistently highlights the quality of design and the smoothness of the implementation process. One client said: "Our intranet is crucial for employee communication and significantly boosts engagement and collaboration among our colleagues. Completing this project behind the scenes for our brand launch was incredibly challenging, but ThinkShare made it seamless." Another noted: "We've received some incredible stats and colleagues have shared their praise for the design, structure, and capability of the intranet."
Intranet design is not a one-time activity. As the organisation evolves — new teams, rebrands, changing working patterns — so must the intranet. ThinkShare offers SharePoint support packages covering technical support, governance reviews, UX design reviews, and content page and template creation. Post-launch support gives your content editors a named ThinkShare contact rather than a generic helpdesk queue, ensuring that design quality is maintained over time.