Before you officially launch your new intranet software, you’ll have to decide upon the most efficient top-level menu structure for your intranet users. This top-level menu structure plays an important role in supporting employees to quickly navigate through their intranet.

But where do you start? You’ll find commonly utilised navigation strategies below:

Departmental Structure

Replicating your organisation’s departmental structure is a popular method, but it doesn’t suit every organisation. This method can be somewhat limiting as the intranet starts to develop.

Task-based Structure

Implementing this structure will take a great deal more time in comparison to the departmental structure, as it will require a considerable amount of feedback and guidance from end-users to ensure that it’s right for them.

Having a task-based structure that doesn’t help employees efficiently fulfil tasks will ultimately cause frustration. However, when implemented correctly, this structure works well.

Product-based Structure

A product-based structure reflects the product portfolio of the organisation – this isn’t commonly used but can be helpful to organisations based within the manufacturing sector or those with strong product portfolios.

Hybrid Approach

It is important to stress that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach doesn’t exist as each organisation has unique needs.

This may mean taking elements from each approach and creating a ‘hybrid’ menu to suit your users’ individual needs – as seen below.