• Article
  • 13 minutes to read

Well-planned and executed information compages is a prerequisite for an intelligent and high-performing intranet, hub, or site. The about of import first step in planning an effective information architecture is understanding your users and helping them find what they need to complete tasks in a way that makes the most sense to them.

Data architecture also helps improve user adoption, satisfaction, and productivity while reducing It costs, information overload, and minimize compliance and security risks.

In this article:

  • Learn the principal elements of information architecture
  • Review the unlike roles involved in implementing information architecture
  • Empathise the different levels of information architecture – global, hub, and local
  • Explore SharePoint information architecture edifice blocks

Information compages is about how y'all organize and label your content and how your visitors interact with the content to go work done. This includes elements similar navigation, search, site hierarchy, taxonomy, and security. Modern SharePoint information architecture is also almost how to ensure the correct content gets to the right people and follows your organisation's content compliance regulations.

Information architecture covers half-dozen main elements that relate to fashion finding in SharePoint:

  • Global navigational construction – Considered the pinnacle level of navigation across your SharePoint tenant and how you structure your sites and so that users can find content including the abode site of your intranet.
  • Hub structure and organization – Hubs enable you to grouping together similar topics, tasks, and content.
  • Local site and folio navigational construction – How content is organized on each site and folio so that users tin further navigate or consume content finer.
  • Metadata compages – Metadata impacts search and browsing structure too as compliance and retention policies.
  • Search experiences – How your users "consume" information architecture in addition to browsing.
  • Personalized content experiences – How specific content is targeted to certain users and groups of users.

Designing the optimal structure for hubs, sites, and pages requires sufficient planning. It besides requires noesis of the domain, content, understanding the user experience, awareness of design approaches, and best practices in Microsoft SharePoint. Even with a good plan, information compages is a continuous process. Over time, organizations change, people change, and projects change. Over time you will learn about your users, which will allow for adjustment that brand content more discoverable.

Understand your function and how to collaborate

Information architecture for your organization will exist the most effective past collaborating with many types of roles involved in your intranet such equally: intranet owners, departmental business owners, IT administrators, and hub owners just to name a few. Learn more nearly how each part plays a role in planning, implementing, and managing ongoing maintenance for organizational information architecture.

Information architecture roles

System intranet owner(s) – The organizational intranet possessor(southward) consist of a mix of decision-makers and job functions to manage the overall management and coordination of your organisation's intranet. Organizational intranet owners work with business owners (departments) and It admins to establish global and hub level navigation. Organizational intranet owners will spend most of their time working on planning and implementing global and hub level navigation.

Departmental business owners – Departmental business owners represent large areas of the organization, like human resources, marketing, and engineering science. Departmental business owners work with organizational intranet owners to ensure their area of the business is well-represented in global and hub navigation. Organizational intranet owners should be included early on in the planning phase to ensure business organization and user needs are met.

IT Admins – IT admins partner with organizational intranet owners and departmental business owners to implement high level navigational construction like implementing the start page and hubs. It admins also assistance implement certain governance policies effectually site creation and usage. It admins are involved in planning, implementing, and maintaining information architecture as the business changes and scales. Hub owners – Hub owners manage hub-level content, branding, permissions, and navigational elements for hub in your organization'south intranet. Hub owners partner with departmental business owners and IT admins to program, create, and manage hubs throughout the lifecycle of your organization's intranet architecture.

Site owners – Site owners manage site-level content, branding, permissions, and navigation. Depending on the needs of the business organisation and users, site owners can associate their sites to hubs if the hub owner allows.

Content creators – Content creators are responsible for keeping site content updated and publishing news. Content creators should be given a site member permission level to make changes to sites and pages. Content creators partner with site owners during the implementation and direction stages.

Content consumers – Content consumers are non represented in the counts as anyone who is using and viewing content throughout the three levels of navigation. Intranet owners, departmental business owners, hub owners, and site owners should regularly engage with content consumer – especially during the planning process – to ensure the right content is findable and usable.

Guiding principle: the globe is apartment

Classic SharePoint architecture is typically built using a hierarchical organization of site collections and sub-sites, with inherited navigation, permissions, and site designs. Once built, this structure can be inflexible and hard to maintain. In the mod SharePoint experience, sub-sites are not recommended. In the new "flat" globe of modern SharePoint, plan to create one site for each discrete topic, task, or unit of piece of work. This will permit yous to easily distribute direction and accountability for each content collection and support your ability to motility sites around in your navigational architecture without breaking links. Moreover, when a topic is no longer needed, you lot can hands archive or delete a site with minimal bear on.

In the new flat world, you take several ways to connect sites and content to each other every bit part of your data architecture toolkit:

  • Apply "whorl upwards" web parts such as News, Highlighted content, or Sites to dynamically surface content from other sites in an existing site.
  • Utilize inline hyperlinks to provide boosted detail about a topic to provide more information to your reader (as demonstrated in the previous bullet).
  • Add explicit links to related sites in your site navigation.
  • Connect families of related sites using hubs.

Levels of navigation

At that place are three levels of navigation to retrieve virtually for modern SharePoint experiences:

Navigation levels

  • Global navigation for the entire collection of sites that comprise your intranet
  • Hub navigation for groups of related sites
  • Local navigation of an individual site

Many intranets include superlative navigation that persists on every site. Global navigation allows you to create an overall navigation story for your intranet that visually connects all the sites, content, and tools your viewers need to get work done. Every organization has a different requirement for what goes in global navigation, but some of the category labels oftentimes used include concepts such as:

  • Home
  • About Us
  • News
  • Working Hither/Work Resources/Authoritative Services/Administration
  • Operations/Operations Services
  • Pay & Benefits
  • Life & Career
  • Locations
  • Policies & Procedures/Tools & Resource/Safety & Security

The goal of global navigation is to support browsing to content, but since there is limited existent estate available for global navigation links, global links by and large point to major category navigation pages, sub-links, or a mega carte du jour experience to provide enough "data odour" to aid viewers navigate their manner to the content they need. Because the context for global navigation must be broad, it is challenging to make the labels both comprehensive and useful. If yous plan to implement global navigation, you will want to test your proposed navigation to make certain that information technology resonates with users.

Global navigation is enabled with the SharePoint app bar on your home site. You will need to take a habitation site to enable global navigation. Global navigation appears on the left side of every site and folio.

Hub navigation

SharePoint hubs assist organize related sites based on project, section, division, region, or concept. Hubs make it easier to discover related content such equally news and other site activities, apply common navigation, branding, site structure across associated sites and search across all associated sites. I of the important planning decisions for hubs is planning the hub navigation.

Hub navigation

Hub navigation appears in a higher place the local navigation on each site, simply beneath the suite bar, every bit shown in the image before in this article. Hub navigation is established in the site that is declared to be the hub. It is defined past the hub owner and is shared by all the associated sites.

SharePoint hubs example

Each site can belong to only one hub at a time, but y'all can acquaintance hubs together in a combination of navigation links and associated hubs every bit part of your navigation experience. For more information, see Planning your SharePoint hubs.

Local navigation

Local navigation is the static navigation that viewers see on every page of your site. For squad sites, local navigation shows upwardly on the left side of the page in the surface area referred to as the "quick launch". For advice sites, local navigation shows up at the top of the page. Local navigation is on every page in your site. It creates a persistent experience to allow site visitors to motion dorsum and along among the pages and content on each site. Think nigh how viewers might explore your content and utilize local navigation to support that exploration.

Example: A travel site might take the following local navigation links that support viewers who are exploring the travel site from the perspective of "what am I allowed to exercise?" too as viewers who are exploring the travel site from the perspective of the travel process – earlier, during, and subsequently their trip.

  • Travel guidelines
    • Air
    • Machine
    • Ground transportation
    • Hotel
    • Train
  • Before yous get
    • Travel approval
    • Booking service
  • During your trip
    • Travel condom
    • Itinerary changes
  • After y'all return
    • Expense reporting
    • Trip reports

Where you'll run into local navigation elements:

Team site navigation

Team site navigation

Communication site navigation

Communication site navigation

Sites

Your intranet and portals volition exist comprised of squad sites and communication sites that provide further access into the site's pages, lists, and libraries.

I component to mod SharePoint team sites that makes information architecture easier to implement and maintain are Microsoft 365 groups. Microsoft 365 groups provide a membership service that allows for like shooting fish in a barrel hub and site permissions as well as additional functionality for SharePoint squad sites and Microsoft Teams. With Microsoft 365 groups, y'all can give a group of people access to a collection of collaboration resource like Planner, OneNote, SharePoint team sites, and more than. M365 groups tin can only be used on SharePoint team sites.

Pages

Pages within squad or advice sites provide an opportunity to use dynamic spider web parts that automatically update content from other sites and pages similar News, Highlighted content, or Sites spider web parts. Every page in each site tells a story for the reader.

Your sites will more often than not include three types of pages:

  • The home folio where you volition provide an overview of your content and introduce the reader to what they will discover on the site.
  • Navigation pages that provide options or summary data for the reader and help them get to a decision point about where they want to get next.
  • Destination pages that are the terminate indicate of the reader's journey. This is where you will present information to read, print, or download. If yous accept a lot of data on your destination folio or you lot desire to provide supplemental explanations for detailed topics, you can create an ancillary page.

Since we know that most readers exercise non read every word on a web folio or even gyre to the bottom, you lot need to pay attention to how you nowadays information on each page. Brand sure that you put the most of import data – the information that your readers must accept for your communication to be successful – at the elevation of the page. Every bit the folio continues, you can add additional data that is helpful, merely non crucial. Call back of this equally writing with your summary or decision up forepart, instead of at the end. Use sections, headings, and bullets to make your pages easier to read. For more than info, see Add sections and columns on SharePoint modern page.

Navigational elements are menu styles similar the mega menu, pour menu, and footer menus. Secondary navigational elements include inline links and buttons.

Navigation elements

Personalization elements

Audience targeting - Audience targeting helps the most relevant content get to the right audiences. By enabling audience targeting, specific content will exist prioritized to specific audiences through SharePoint web parts, page libraries, and navigational links.

SharePoint hubs

Information barriers - Information barriers are policies in Microsoft 365 that a compliance admin can configure to foreclose users from communicating and collaborating with each other. This is useful if, for example, one division is handling information that shouldn't exist shared with specific other divisions, or a sectionalization needs to be prevented, or isolated, from collaborating with all users exterior of the sectionalisation. Information barriers are ofttimes used in highly regulated industries and those with compliance requirements, such as finance, legal, and government.

Multilingual considerations - If your organisation spans a diverse population, you may want to make content in your intranet sites bachelor in multiple languages. User interface elements like site navigation, site title, and site description can be shown in the user'southward preferred linguistic communication. Additionally, you can provide pages and news posts on advice sites that you lot translate and that are shown in the user's preferred language.

To show the site name, navigation, and footer of your site in the different languages you've made available, each must exist translated manually. For instance, let's say you've created a communication site with an English default language, and y'all've enabled the site for Spanish and German languages. When you create a site, you set up the site name and description in the default language (in this case, English). Y'all can too update the site proper name and description after site creation. Then you create the navigation nodes and footer content in English.

Afterwards the site is set in English, a user with Spanish as their preferred personal language manually edits and translates the title, description, navigation and footer content into Castilian. A user with German language every bit their preferred personal linguistic communication does the same for German. Once the content is translated, it volition brandish for all users of those preferred languages.

Metadata architecture

Columns and content types are the two most of import metadata elements that you tin can employ to organize documents and pages in your SharePoint site. Metadata helps your users filter and sort content within a listing or library – simply also helps with search. Use columns in your Site Pages library likewise so that you tin can employ highlighted content web parts to dynamically connect related pages based on shared metadata.

Folders are another way to organize document content, but folders are a concrete construct with limited flexibility. Folders are non necessarily bad – they can aid you manage functioning and security in your document libraries – but folder structures with more than than ane or ii levels of nesting create a meaning discoverability burden for users and should be avoided. Every site comes with one document library – merely you lot are not express to just 1 library. Instead of using the one default Documents library on your intranet sites, consider adding topic-specific libraries and add site columns to organize your content within the libraries to avoid creating multiple levels of nested folders.

Search experiences

Search leverages your information architecture investments to help users find content when they don't know where it might be in your architecture. It also helps users discover content that they may non have known almost.

You can assist users discover content and amend search outcomes by leveraging several features in search, including acronyms, bookmarks, Q&A, flooring plans, and locations. For more info, run across Make content easy to find and Search experiences in SharePoint.

Next: learn about SharePoint data architecture principles