Design a Brilliant SharePoint Intranet

SharePoint Is Here, It’s Clear, Get Used to It

Microsoft SharePoint is a platform for creating intranets. It includes many helpful features such as: search, CMS, news, employee directory, personalization, team collaboration spaces, blogs, wikis, and news.

Some Microsoft SharePoint intranets are nothing short of marvelous — rich with features that support the business and engage employees, anchored by predictable navigation, supported by a smart search, and with page layouts that make employees want to scan all the content. But it was not always this way.

In 2001 when we conducted our first independent UX research study of intranets and wrote our first Intranet Design Annual, SharePoint suffered new-to-the-world product challenges: it required explaining to the “intranet portal” market (IT experts, HR teams, corporate communications departments, procurement, and not least of all, CTO’s) what a global intranet was and why it was important. Once that hurdle was cleared, the product suffered the usual new enterprise-software issues. SharePoint had competition such as Plumtree, Epicentric, and Oracle. Plumtree and Epicentric are out of business. The other two (SharePoint and Oracle) survived, buoyed by the giant, warm bankrolls of their respective large companies. Although SharePoint lived, it seemed to be mother Microsoft’s neglected baby for a long time. Customers were, well, lost back then. Many intranets based on the fledgling SharePoint were designed by well-meaning IT folks who had no idea what they were getting themselves into. (I am using the word “designed” very generously, as they were usually installed and set up just enough to barely function, then set off to fend for themselves.)

But times have changed. Love it or not, SharePoint has forged a strong foothold on the intranet market, and is unlikely to walk or slip out of it any time soon. Evidence includes:

• Strong market adoption: The Radicati Group’s 2015 "Microsoft SharePoint Market Analysis, 2015-2019” report asserts that “Microsoft SharePoint continues to see strong market adoption across all verticals, and is projected to grow at an annual average growth rate of 20% over the next four years.”
• Our first Intranet Design Annual winner using SharePoint, METRO Group, didn’t show up until 2006, and was the only SharePoint winner that year. Conversely, 9 out of 10 2016 winners use SharePoint.
• Large development community: There are nearly 10K members of the SharePoint community at the time of this article’s writing.
• Design agencies: A myriad of design agencies specifically advertise expertise in SharePoint UX design and development. One directory, TopSharePoint.com, alone lists more than 5K of them.
• Companion-product market: Companies invest in and release third-party solutions (such as Unily) that sit on top of SharePoint (and sometimes Office 365 too) and provide a head start to an intranet design.

Great SharePoint Design

Successful intranet teams use SharePoint’s out-of-box offerings as an edge, not an end, and stretch and massage the technology to fit their organization’s mold. For example, NAV CANADA, produced one of the SharePoint-based winning intranets showcased in our Intranet Design Annual 2016. This intranet’s homepage alone includes many helpful attributes, including:

• Visually-pleasing, on-brand design
• Simple navigation that is easy to identify due to its location and the use of background color
• Elevated visibility of commonly used applications, pages, and sites
• A carousel with promotions, announcements and other special interest stories
• A wide, fat footer at the bottom that repeats the global navigation topics and lists the same links that appear in the megamenu
• Many helpful content-related features, such as project highlights to make employees aware of core projects and goals; and employee highlights, dedicated to promoting initiatives or events that are directly related to employee life at NAV CANADA

Our Best SharePoint Intranets report contains more SharePoint-specific advice and rich case studies from SharePoint intranets. Winning SharePoint case studies from this year are presented in detail in the 2016 Intranet Design Annual.

Advice for Winning Design Teams

If you work in intranet design, you either already work with SharePoint or will, at the very least, consider doing so at some point. Take advice from the best of the best teams working with SharePoint intranet designs.

SharePoint Is Not Turnkey

Simply installing SharePoint is only the beginning. To have a great intranet, you will still need UX design and development.

No doubt you have heard some horrific stories about SharePoint, and maybe told a few of your own. There are various reasons for the bad experiences, but most stem from the false belief that SharePoint is a magic genie on the cloud, a miracle software that solves all intranet glitches and hitches once it is installed. There are common reasons for this belief, and realizing that you are in denial is the first step in solving the problem. Don’t fall into one of these traps:

• Don’t be led or tricked into trusting that installed equals good.
• Don’t be overly hopeful, and hear only what you want to hear.
• Don’t be superficial in your research.
• Don’t think that SharePoint will help create an intranet in an unrealistically short amount of time, in spite of a trivial budget, or with a too small and ill-equipped team.

SharePoint Intranets Need Planning, Design, Research, and Development

Winning teams follow many different design strategies for their SharePoint intranets. Some common traits include the following:

• Business analysis: Consider corporate goals and how the intranet will help achieve them, and turn these into functional requirements.
• Possible organizational-change management
• Content-migration strategy
• Governance and content-management strategy
• IA planning, and navigation design for global navigation and footer
  One of the biggest mistakes is to assume that a default global navigation in SharePoint will support your IA. Default global navigation does not suggest a usable, useful content structure for your particular content. This needs to be researched, defined, studied, and refined.
• UX design and usability research so the design may be iterated until it works well for employees
• Promotion, support, and training strategy

Enlist UX Designers Who Know SharePoint

Your SharePoint developer may or may not be a good UX designer. So you need UX designers. Ideally, they should have a grasp of SharePoint’s capabilities. These experts should offer creative input that is reasonable within SharePoint’s constraints. Do not to limit the initial brainstorming and ideas, but be realistic as UX plans begin to gel and become requirements.

Allow More Time If Using a Version of SharePoint That Is New to Your Developers

First and foremost, your SharePoint developers should know the platform and know it well. When you’re using a version of SharePoint that is new (or new to the developers), designs can prove more difficult than estimated. In these cases, the builds and prototypes can delay the entire project. Even somewhat common activities, such as implementing multi-language support and migrating existing content can sometimes be very complicated. For example, some winning teams encountered difficulties locating a tool that guaranteed safe migration of data (including permissions, document revisions, date stamps, and more.) They needed to hire external resources to assist the internal-migration team.

Allow extra time and training for development hiccups, especially if using a version of SharePoint unfamiliar to your developers.

Find Simpatico SharePoint Consultants

It’s imperative that SharePoint developers and designers can work well with the rest of the intranet team. The SharePoint experts become a core part of the team and often drive many of the important decisions. Most winning teams refer to the SharePoint experts as their “SharePoint partner.” The term “partner” may just be smart marketing on Microsoft’s or the consultant’s part. But, I think it comes from bonding and working on a long-term, large-scale project together. Building an intranet is akin to producing a Broadway show or erecting a cable-stayed bridge. Team members learn to communicate well, they rely on one another, and everyone on the team is important. In the end, they have bonded, produced something major that they are proud of, achieved goals, and, while they may be happy when the launch is finally completed, the completion is bittersweet.

Interview SharePoint consultants and full-time staff thoroughly to ensure that you can work effectively and comfortably together for some time.

Put My Site’s Capabilities in Front of Users

Without any help or advertising, employees will often ignore My Site capabilities (such as managing your documents, tasks, links, calendar, colleagues, and other personal information; sharing your affinities and areas of expertise, current projects, and colleague relationships; getting targeted information from content providers based on the information that you and your organization provide in your profile, such as your title) in SharePoint. At best, they may use the bare minimum features — basically treat My Site as a personal drive. This suboptimal usage is unfortunate, because My Site can be a powerful tool that put the employees in better control of content. To make sure that users took advantage of My Site, winning designs do the following to prevent this from happening:

• Assume that users will never change the default set of components they will see, and choose the default set accordingly.
• Simplify the out-of-the-box My Site navigation, which can be confusing for users.
• Advertise My Site on the intranet, via the global-navigation menus, the homepage, and on other related pages. As a result, employees can take advantage of the newsfeed, sites, tasks, apps, and other features that come with My Site. (Maybe the most helpful one is the custom My Subscriptions component. Greater use of this feature helps to establish My Site as a content-delivery channel.)
• Pare down the set of web parts in the web-part gallery to prevent contributors from building wildly different pages.
• Don’t allow users to be administrators of their personal sites, to avoid catastrophic consequences such as deleting their own site.
• Schedule plenty of time and resources for responsive designs, as in these cases reworking the standard SharePoint page elements can be complex.

Plan Infrastructure for Features That Can Be Switched On

SharePoint offers many exciting features that are easy to switch on. But winning teams don’t blindly answer the siren’s call and use every available feature. Instead they are discriminating about which features to adopt. They evaluate which would behove their employees, and which they are able to support at launch and in the long term. They take stock of their governance model, content structure, and content planning before committing to using optional features. In short, they recognize their capabilities and constraints and plan accordingly.

Search and social features were two notable features that caused unanticipated grief to our Intranet Design Annual winners. Their advice:

• Employ a librarian or at least a librarian function to improve the search. SharePoint’s robust search functionality offers capabilities to narrow search results using filters, and looks at the taxonomy to define facets. Librarians can analyze the search data to provide more value on the search-engine results page (SERP). They may define best bets, change the order of results, write rules for content inclusion and exclusion to make searches more accurate, and determine managed properties for all content sources.
• Employees need guidance about how to use social features such as comments, ratings, blogs, and feeds. For example:
  • Management should formally sanction and use social features, and policies should be available on the intranet.
  • To encourage reader responses, add a question or a call to action at the end of all articles.
  • Persuade champions to start conversations to eliminate the “I don’t want to be first” issue.

Organize and Manage Collaboration Spaces

SharePoint makes it easy to create team spaces by letting non-developers set up and maintain areas for people to communicate. These areas can become thriving, breathing ecosystems that aid teams — or dark silos where information is old, duplicated, buried, and difficult to find, especially for people unfamiliar with the space. Employees should be educated about collaboration spaces.

If organizations aren’t careful, an old intranet problem — having content hidden among many different intranet sites — could easily rear its ugly head in a slightly altered form today. To avoid this:

• Ensure that all team space content is well indexed.
• Make a plan for integrating far-reaching content into the main intranet’s IA.
• Develop rules about when to create new spaces. Encourage people to use an existing space when possible, rather than making a new one.

Customized Look–and–Feel Takes Some Work

Many teams say it’s important that the intranet has its own look–and–feel and doesn’t look like SharePoint. To achieve this, some winners used visual designers on staff or hired consultants. But they all needed SharePoint developers to implement their branding and desired look.

Some had an easier time implementing their branding, and others had a very difficult time. Those who wanted to change the page layouts significantly said it took many hours to do so. For some who had not anticipated the need to customize the intranet’s visuals, it delayed in the project.

Few Roles

Personalization is a powerful way to push content to and hide it from individuals based on their roles. While SharePoint allows sophisticated personalization, many winners say that having just a few roles, and avoiding too much granularity in the permissions can keep personalization manageable and helpful.

Plan User Training

Any changed UX may confuse users, even if it is a better design or if they have used a SharePoint-based intranet before. In-person training at new-employee orientation, promotions of features, tips and short video tutorials are just a few ways in which winning teams helped their users.

Microsoft Shops May Have an Advantage

Is your IT group and other employees using Microsoft software? Several teams were relatively happy with the integration between SharePoint and other Microsoft offerings, such as Office 365. Winners said that SharePoint provided tight integration with their organization’s existing systems. And for their users, familiarity was a productivity and adoption advantage.

This doesn’t mean you can’t make SharePoint work well if you’re not a Microsoft shop, but it might be a bit trickier.

Learn from Others

Winning teams looked for inspiration in other great intranets (via reports, articles, and subscriptions to local and global networking groups) and highly recommend doing so.

Conclusion

I have had a love/dislike relationship with SharePoint for the past 15 years. The dislike part stems from the unplanned, unmonitored, unbridled jumbles that cost money, reduce employee productivity, and upset employee motivation and morale.

If you have a poor SharePoint intranet there’s plenty of blame to go around. But not to wallow in it. Consider the lessons learned and the advice from the SharePoint Intranet Design Annual winners. These teams have cultivated or tamed the mare that is SharePoint, and sprinted to win the Triple Crown for intranets. And this is where the love part comes in.

(For more advice on UX design with SharePoint, see the report with detailed case studies and a large number of screenshots of winning designs.)