Top Intranet Design Ideas: Principles for Good Company Intranet Design

Whether you're an intranet owner, admin, digital workplace manager, HR professional, UX expert, or part of an IT team, the tips below will help you make informed decisions for an engaging corporate intranet design.

First, before we get in any other advice - to be successful in intranet design, you must know you end-users! If not, you are bound to fail. We also recommend that users should be brought into the process, perhaps as a reference group, to ensure a good outcome. So, understand your personas, gather their feedback, and tailor the intranet to their needs. 

Now, let's delve into some practical advice on intranet design.

Your intranet should feel like an extension of your company’s identity. A cohesive design fosters familiarity, builds trust, and strengthens employee connection to the organization. Here's how:

Apply Visual Branding: Use consistent colors, fonts, and imagery to reflect your company’s identity, creating a familiar and trustworthy environment.

Follow Design Principles: Apply corporate design principles across all pages for uniformity in buttons, headings, and icons.

Support Multiple Brands: For organizations with sub-brands, create distinct spaces within the same intranet solution, maintaining a unified structure while offering personalized experiences.

We also recommend setting up a centrally managed media bank to supply editors and publishers with your recommended images and videos. Learn more about features in Omnia supporting a user-friendly experience.

Good intranet design goes beyond aesthetics. It’s about intuitive navigation, customized search, personalized content, AI-powered suggestions, WCAG compliance, and providing seamless access to information.

To optimize user experience, use these pillars for planning the solution:

Expect to combine several types of navigation within your solution: Mega menus, currect navigation, directories, visual navigation, personalized navigation, and more. Categorize content logically and setup navigation using terms that users can relate to. On the first navigation level, user mega menues for improved visibility of content.

Learn more about navigation in this blog post: 12 Great Intranet Navigation Examples.

Using clickable processes for navigation builds understanding of how the business works.

Implement robust search features with categories, filters, promoted search results to help to improve the search experinece. Allow for search feedback and study search statistics closely for data-driven decisions on how to improve. Use AI-powered semantic search to support users in finding what they are looking for - faster.

Check out Omnia's capabiltities for delivering a great search experience via this link.

People search with custom filters and refiners will help end-users find what they are looking for.

From the start, have centrally managed term sets for categorization of content and ensure rich user profiles for enhanced targeting. Make sure that end-users are invited to subscribe to content, topics, or tags. Allow users to tailor their 'dashboards' and feeds with role-specific news, resources, and document recommendations.

Read more about personalized content and notifications using this link.

A targeted local news article with related news and my news to the right.

Provide opt-in options for updates relevant to users’ roles without overwhelming them. Allow for end-users shutting notifications off - or even better: Ensure notifications are turned off after work hours.

Learn more about how to drive your intranet initiative by downloading this document: The Step-by-Step Guide to Intranet Success.

Notification Panel with personalized feeds of content within a variety of channels, with notifications on desktop and mobile.

A cluttered, confusing intranet is a productivity killer. Design with clarity and purpose to help employees find what they need, fast. Focus on these principles:

Effective Information Architecture: Organize content hierarchically, grouping related resources together for easy navigation.

Highlight Key Content: Feature corporate news, HR policies, and popular resources prominently on the homepage.

Centralized Resources: Ensure tools like document libraries and HR forms are easy to locate in a centralized hub.

Mobile Optimization: Ensure the intranet is fully responsive, supporting remote and hybrid work environments. Design for mobile-first, allowing access from any device, anywhere.

AI-Driven Personalization: Use AI to recommend content, categorize documents, and assist with navigation through chatbots or semantic search.

Your intranet should evolve with your organization. Regularly measure performance to identify what’s working and what needs improvement:

Solution Usage: Regularly check metrics for overall usage and compare both with last week or month and between various user groups.

Communication Reach: Follow up if your message reaches the right users. Ensure precision targeting and follow-up, compare with your targets.

Engagement Metrics: Monitor page views, click rates, shares, and popular content.

Search Analytics: Identify common search queries to uncover content gaps.

User Feedback: Gather input through surveys and direct feedback channels for continuous improvement.

A successful corporate intranet design is visually appealing, user-friendly, and effective in delivering the right information to the right people. By following these intranet design principles and ideas, your organization can boost engagement, productivity, and internal communication.

Remember, a company intranet should evolve with your business. Regular feedback and data-driven updates will ensure it remains relevant and effective.

Ready to redesign your intranet? Contact us to discover how we can help you achieve your business goals with a modern, engaging intranet solution - and present how Omnia can help you on the journey.