When your company’s internal website appears outdated, employees can tell. An old, disorganized, difficult-to-use online workspace doesn’t only annoy staff, it also indicates to them that their employer doesn’t care about their workplace experience. And that will lead to employee turnover, rather than just extra work for your tech team.
The Shift From Storage to Experience
Most old-fashioned intranets simply tried to store information in a place where people could access it. Modern digital workspaces, however, are designed based on the question: what does a user actually need upon logging in? This way of posing the question opens up an entirely different range of possibilities.
For starters, instead of simply saving files, it means thinking about information architecture. That is, how content is structured and how you get to it, rather than where it is stored. It means that the homepage is not a homepage. It’s a carefully curated dashboard that dynamically shows users what they need based on who they are, where they work, and what you know they’re doing right now.
Personalization is what handles this for you. Using metadata tied to role, location, department, etc., you can show the right HR policies, team updates, or project resources without anyone having to dig around.
Design Isn’t Decoration
Visual design should not be considered an add-on, but an essential element of the SharePoint deployment process. This is where professional Sharepoint Design Services can enhance adoption rates and employee engagement. Visual design includes the overall structure and layout of the portal, the branding, the images and video content used, the font size and type, and the use of color.
Human brains prefer well-organized and visually appealing content. A cluttered, poorly-designed, unattractive layout frustrates users and drives them away. It also creates an impression of poor information quality and negatively influences the perception of the brand.
Visuals stimulate and engage. On average, a reader will only read 20% of the text on a web page, but will view every one of the images. Over 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual. Our brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. So if the interface is dull and boring, the attention and time users will spend on it will be minimal. A SharePoint site is a business tool. It can be a beautiful, engaging tool or a frustrating, boring tool.
Reduce Friction Everywhere You Can
Digital friction refers to the overall negative experience people have when interacting with technology systems. In terms of digital workplaces, the concept points to the general sentiment that things don’t work as they should. It’s buzzworthy because it makes for a good euphemism to describe an amalgam of several problems. Systems are too complicated, require too much effort to get what you’re after, and can’t pretend to be useful all day long because they’re constantly getting in the way of work.
That can mean multiple things. You often can’t search for what you need directly from your browser, so people keep links to all critical resources in a never-ending spreadsheet. Worse, search results are bloated with content you don’t need. Most personnel don’t know what’s on this so-called intranet or what might be available because they could never find anything of value there in the past.
Building Community in a Distributed Workforce
Hybrid work destroyed the informal things that helped create company culture. The chit-chat in the hall, seeing how many cars were in the parking lot on a Friday, getting a not-too-heavy-handed hint of who was staying late or coming early, and even seeing that someone wasn’t at their desk.
If companies are going to recreate that in a hybrid world, they have to make sure the digital workspace has intentional social features. Comment sections on news posts, reaction options, employee spotlights, peer recognition feeds, these aren’t frivolous additions. They’re the mechanisms through which culture becomes visible in a distributed environment.
That visibility is useful and important, because it helps signal the informal culture of a “busy floor”, seeing multiple people have some accolade because someone’s child graduated, for instance. If the workspace doesn’t build in those touchpoints intentionally, we’ll lose an important part of the future of work.
Mobile Access Isn’t Optional Anymore
A large group in the workforce, frontline workers, field workers, non-desk-based staff, accesses the digital workspace almost exclusively through a phone or tablet. If that experience isn’t truly workable on mobile, for those workers, a digital workspace doesn’t really exist.
Mobile-first design doesn’t simply mean your developers attempt to make sure your landing page isn’t entirely broken on an iPhone. It means starting the design process from the understanding that this is how a significant chunk of your users will see it. That’s a very different proposition.
Content and navigation need to be thumb-friendly in mobile environments. Fast load speeds, minified images, and elegant font choices synchronized to render beautifully on mobile connections aren’t “nice to haves,” they’re essentials. And the flip side is that any feature that requires a desktop machine or a lot of screen real estate has to be given a very hard look. Governance is a part of this. A beautifully designed, fully mobile-responsive workspace where content goes to die because no one ever un-publishes anything may look visually tidy but it won’t function that way for long. Sprawl kills. A well-managed workspace with clear ownership, defined permissions, and regular content audits prevents that decay and keeps the environment functional over time.
