How we created a design and development system to enable a global organization to optimize their use of SharePoint Online
Design Toolkit 
Bringing Order to Sprawl
Many organizations have gone all in with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint for collaboration, productivity, and communications.
Rooms to Go was working with one of our Microsoft partners to migrate their on-premise environments to SharePoint Online. This created an opportunity to standardize design patterns and improve the navigation of the corporate intranet and across departmental communication sites.
In the early stages of our efforts, we worked closely with the collective team to establish the core goals:
Leverage the well-developed corporate brand assets to improve the employee experience
Design clear navigation and consistent layouts to aid employee discovery and productivity
Provide a scalable set of design patterns and approaches to enable ongoing evolution and growth
The Brand is for Employees, Too
If you live in a place where Rooms to Go has a presence, you have probably seen their advertising, which leverages vibrant, engaging graphics. We thought, why not bring this same richness to their employees, who we believe are an equally important audience. As a kind of proof of concept, we first updated their internal network’s logo, demonstrating how the brand’s power could instantly transform the internal experience.
Building a Design System
Main Homepage Hero
Department Homepage
Hero
Department Quicklinks
Region Quicklinks
Solving for Sprawl
SharePoint Online provides great tools to build and manage internal sites across an enterprise. But, for these sites to provide maximum value, they need to be organized based on how employees really access information at the corporate, department, and team levels.
In our pursuit of optimal site architecture, we followed the mantra of “configure, don’t customize.” We wanted to bend but not break SharePoint’s constraints, ultimately identifying the best way to enable in-site and cross-site navigation without extra development work.
Scalable Architecture for Communication, Hub, and Team Sites
Multi-Tiered Navigation that Works for Everyone
Two-Tier Hub & Site Navigation
- Directories and Department Links
- Site Specific Links
Multiple levels of navigation
Hub-specific Sites
The Whole is the Sum of its Web Parts
To ensure the consistency of the interface’s design, usability, and functionality, we created a comprehensive library of reusable SharePoint web parts. This also makes it easier for Rooms to Go to create new sites that integrate seamlessly into the whole.
