SharePoint Intranet Design Company: Enterprise Employee Experiences

Why Choose a Specialized SharePoint Intranet Design Company

The enterprise intranet market is crowded with SaaS alternatives — Unily, LumApps, Simpplr, Staffbase — that promise easier deployment than SharePoint. But for organizations already invested in Microsoft 365, these tools add cost, complexity, and a disjointed user experience. A purpose-built SharePoint intranet leverages your existing licensing, integrates natively with Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and Copilot, and keeps all content within your Microsoft 365 compliance boundary.

The challenge is that building a world-class intranet on SharePoint requires deep platform expertise that most IT teams and generalist agencies do not possess. Modern SharePoint intranets involve hub site architecture, SPFx custom web parts, Viva Connections integration, Adaptive Card Extensions, audience targeting, multilingual publishing, and search schema customization — capabilities that demand a specialized SharePoint intranet design company.

EPC Group's SharePoint consulting practice has designed and deployed intranets for organizations ranging from 1,000 to 200,000+ employees. Our intranets consistently achieve 70-85% monthly active usage rates because we invest heavily in user research and information architecture — the two disciplines that determine whether an intranet succeeds or fails.

Our SharePoint Intranet Design Process

Phase 1: Discovery and User Research

Every successful intranet starts with understanding what employees actually need — not what stakeholders assume they need. EPC Group conducts stakeholder interviews, employee surveys, card sorting exercises, and analytics review of existing platforms to identify the top tasks employees perform, the content they search for most, the pain points in current workflows, and the departmental needs that a one-size-fits-all approach will miss. This research directly informs the information architecture and feature prioritization.

Phase 2: Information Architecture

Information architecture is the single biggest determinant of intranet success. We design hub and spoke site architectures that group content by audience and task, not by organizational chart. Navigation structures are tested with users through tree testing before development begins. Search is configured with custom result sources, promoted results, acronym definitions, and verticals that surface the right content in the right context.

Phase 3: Visual Design and Branding

Modern SharePoint supports extensive branding through the SharePoint theme engine, custom site designs, SPFx web parts, and header/footer extensions. EPC Group designs intranets that reflect your brand identity while maintaining SharePoint's responsive, accessible design system. We apply your color palette, typography, and iconography consistently across all site types — communication sites, team sites, and Viva Connections dashboards — creating a cohesive employee experience.

Phase 4: Development and SPFx Solutions

When out-of-the-box web parts do not meet requirements, our developers build custom SPFx solutions: department directory web parts, event calendars with registration, interactive org charts, policy acknowledgment workflows, IT service catalogs, and data-driven dashboards. All custom solutions follow Microsoft's SPFx best practices, including tenant-wide deployment, CDN optimization, graceful degradation, and WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility compliance.

Phase 5: Viva Connections Integration

Viva Connections brings your SharePoint intranet into Microsoft Teams, creating a unified employee experience platform. EPC Group configures the Viva Connections dashboard with Adaptive Card Extensions (ACEs) for quick actions — PTO balance checks, IT ticket submission, expense approval, and company announcements — that employees access without leaving Teams. The Viva Connections feed surfaces Microsoft 365 content personalized to each user's role and department.

Phase 6: Content Strategy and Migration

A beautiful intranet with no content is useless. EPC Group works with your communications, HR, and IT teams to develop a content strategy, migrate existing content (with cleanup and restructuring), establish editorial workflows, and train content authors. We implement page approval workflows, scheduled publishing, and content expiration policies to keep the intranet fresh and relevant long after launch.

SharePoint Intranet Features We Build

Why Intranets Fail (and How We Prevent It)

Industry research shows that 60-70% of enterprise intranets fail to achieve meaningful adoption. The reasons are consistent:

• No user research: The intranet was designed by committee, not by understanding actual employee needs. EPC Group starts every engagement with user research.
• Bad information architecture: Content is organized by org chart instead of by task. Users cannot find what they need. We test navigation with real users before development.
• Stale content: No editorial process means news is months old and policies are outdated. We implement governance workflows that keep content current.
• No executive sponsorship: Without visible leadership engagement, the intranet is seen as an IT project, not a business tool. We coach executive sponsors on visible participation.
• Desktop-only design: Frontline workers without laptops cannot access the intranet. Our designs are mobile-first and integrate with Teams mobile and Viva Connections.

Frequently Asked Questions