5 Steps to Perfect SharePoint Design in 2026

Key Takeaways

• The best SharePoint design isn’t always visual. Across dozens of intranet projects, the most common recommendations were about findability, governance and usability rather than colours, layouts or branding.
• Findability remains the biggest intranet challenge. Navigation, search, information architecture and content structure have a greater impact on employee experience than any homepage redesign.
• Successful intranets are built on strong foundations. Governance, content ownership, accessibility and consistent publishing standards are what keep an intranet useful long after launch.
• Modern SharePoint design extends beyond the homepage. The most effective intranets are integrated with Teams, Viva, Copilot and daily workflows, helping employees find information, tools and services wherever they’re working.

One of the biggest misconceptions about SharePoint design is that it’s primarily about how your intranet looks.

Of course, visual design matters. Nobody wants an intranet that feels dated, cluttered or disconnected from their organisation’s brand. But good SharePoint design also brings together findability, governance, content ownership, accessibility, navigation. Colours, layouts and imagery make a good first impression, but that’s not always what determines whether people continue to use an intranet after launch.

We reviewed dozens of our recent intranet projects at Silicon Reef, looking across higher education, energy, media, financial services, the public sector and more. These are the top five SharePoint design recommendations our consultants make more than any others.

Step 1: Design Around Employee Needs, Not Organisational Structures

If there’s one recommendation that appears more often than any other in our SharePoint projects, it’s this: stop designing your intranet around the organisation chart.

Most employees don’t think in departments. They think in tasks.

They want to find a policy. Book annual leave. Access a system. Find a colleague. Get the latest update from leadership. The way employees interact with an intranet rarely mirrors the way an organisation is structured.

That’s why nearly every successful intranet project starts with discovery. Surveys, focus groups, workshops, analytics and content audits help uncover what employees actually need from their digital workplace before a single design decision is made. Across multiple discovery projects, from higher education institutions to large distributed organisations, the strongest outcomes came when decisions were based on evidence rather than assumptions.

At the University of Leeds, extensive employee research helped shape recommendations around navigation, content priorities and search experience before the design phase began. Rather than asking stakeholders what they wanted the intranet to be, the project focused on understanding what staff needed it to do.

Good questions to ask before jumping into design:

• What are people trying to achieve when they arrive on the intranet?
• What information do they need every day?
• Where are they currently getting stuck?
• What do they search for most often?

The answers should shape your design far more than internal politics or departmental structures.

Step 2: Make Findability Your Number One Design Priority

Across almost every discovery project we run, somebody eventually says some version of the same thing:

“I know it’s there. I just can’t find it.”

That’s why SharePoint design today is increasingly an information architecture challenge rather than a visual design challenge.

Yes, employees’ first impression of your intranet will be made by how impressive the homepage looks. But in the long run, they’ll judge it by how quickly they can find the policy, form, colleague, system or resource they’re looking for.

Our research found that search, navigation and findability consistently emerged as some of the biggest frustrations across intranets. Those frustrations often emerge because content has grown organically over the years with little or no structure. Now, many organisations have too much content organised in a way that makes sense to content owners rather than end users.

We’ve seen this challenge everywhere, from global organisations supporting employees across multiple countries and business units to scaling SMBs preparing their intranet for growth.

In the context of findability, strong intranet design means thinking carefully about:

• Information architecture
• Navigation structures
• Search experiences
• Metadata and tagging
• Policy libraries
• Quick links
• People directories

Done well, these design aspects can have a huge impact. After working with us on a new SharePoint intranet, University of Leeds saw a 74% increase in findability.

A beautiful intranet that nobody can navigate is still a failed intranet. Design the structure with the same level of care as the homepage.

Step 3: Build Trust Through Content Governance

When people hear the word “governance”, they don’t often associate it with design. But they should.

An employee who clicks on a policy and discovers it’s three years out of date isn’t thinking about governance. They’re simply losing trust in the intranet.

Trust is one of the most overlooked aspects of SharePoint design.

Across project after project, we found that successful intranets have clear ownership, clear accountability and clear content lifecycles. Outdated information is removed. Policies are reviewed. Content owners know what they’re responsible for. Employees can see who created information and when it was last updated.

One recommendation that repeatedly surfaced was the inclusion of visible trust signals, such as named content owners and review dates. These small details help users quickly understand whether information is current and reliable.

Governance isn’t the thing that slows an intranet down. It’s the thing that prevents it becoming unusable two years after launch.

This is becoming even more important as organisations adopt Microsoft Copilot. AI-powered experiences are only as useful as the content they’re drawing from. If information is inaccurate, duplicated or poorly organised, those problems don’t disappear. They simply become more visible.

Step 4: Create Consistent and Accessible Content Patterns

Many organisations invest heavily in their intranet homepage but forget about the thousands of pages that sit underneath it.

That’s where templates become important.

The best intranets don’t rely on every content author being a design expert. Instead, they provide consistent structures that make publishing easier and the employee experience more predictable.

When someone visits a policy page, they should know what to expect. When they visit a department page, they should know where key information will be located. When they read a news article, the experience should feel familiar.

Across multiple projects, we found recommendations repeatedly centred on creating standardised templates, clearer heading structures, better accessibility practices and more consistent content layouts. These approaches make content easier to consume, easier to maintain and easier to scale.

This is particularly important for internal communications teams.

Without agreed standards, publishing becomes inconsistent. Content quality varies between departments. Employees spend more time working out how information is presented than actually consuming it.

Templates aren’t restrictive. They’re what make good design repeatable.

The bonus is that accessibility improves too. Clear page structures, appropriate headings, descriptive links and mobile-friendly layouts benefit everyone, not just employees using assistive technologies.

Step 5: Design Beyond the Homepage

A decade ago, intranet design was largely about the homepage. Today, employees interact with information everywhere.

They access content through Microsoft Teams, Viva Connections, from mobile devices. They jump directly to tools and applications. They arrive via search results rather than navigation. In other words, the homepage is no longer the whole experience.

The most effective intranets are designed around that flow of work.

Some of the most common reasons employees visit the intranet are to:

• Access business applications
• Complete HR processes
• Read organisational updates
• Find policies and procedures
• Connect with colleagues
• Access frequently used tools

That’s why many of our projects focus on improving access through Teams, creating personalised quick links, supporting mobile users and introducing targeted experiences where they genuinely add value.

The key phrase here is ‘where they add value’.

Personalisation can be incredibly powerful. But it can also create a fragmented experience if it’s implemented without strong foundations. We’d always recommend getting governance, metadata and information architecture right before investing heavily in targeting and personalisation.

Bonus Tip: A Great Intranet Should Still Look Like Your Organisation

If you’ve noticed that visual design hasn’t featured heavily in our top five recommendations, that’s intentional.

When we reviewed the most common findings from recent intranet projects, the biggest challenges weren’t visual. They were structural, operational and content-related.

But that doesn’t mean visual design isn’t important. Far from it.

A well-designed intranet should feel unmistakably like your organisation. Branding, imagery, typography and user experience all contribute to creating a sense of identity and belonging.

We’ve seen the impact this has with organisations such as Bauer Media, where employee experience and brand experience are closely connected. The intranet shouldn’t feel like a separate system. It should feel like a natural extension of the organisation itself.

This is also where modern SharePoint design has evolved significantly. The days of choosing between strong branding and standard SharePoint functionality are long gone. Solutions such as Silicon Reef’s Beacon allow organisations to combine the governance, accessibility and findability foundations discussed in this article with a rich, branded employee experience.

Visual design still matters. It’s just not always the thing that matters most.

Final Thoughts

Looking back across the intranet projects we’ve delivered over the last year, one lesson stands out above all others.

Successful SharePoint design has become less about creating beautiful pages and more about creating useful experiences. Get the foundations right and the visual design becomes far more effective, because it’s supporting something employees genuinely want to use.

And that’s what great SharePoint design looks like in 2026.