Understanding how NOT to structure your intranet is an easier place to begin design of your site structure so it fits for purpose. The following list details these common pitfalls and reasons why.
- Grouping Content by Organisational Structure (i.e., team/service/department)
- Any change to the structure of an Organisation will immediately render your intranet out-of-date
- Content ownership may change between teams
- New employees are excluded from the ‘insider knowledge’ required to navigate the intranet – teams may have been called something different in their previous organisation and/or performed different tasks
- Content on similar/same topics are often split across multiple team pages. This can cause information conflict as well as confusion about what content is the most correct/should be This forces users to work unnecessarily hard.
- Grouping Content by Format
- Format is not an intuitive way to find content.
- This method assumes that the user has prior knowledge of what format the document is in