Open the menu of a typical company intranet and you will see Human Resources, Finance, IT, Marketing, Operations. It mirrors the organisation chart, because that is how the people who built it think. A new colleague who wants to book a holiday, report a broken laptop or find the travel expense form has to guess which department "owns" the topic first.
Navigation by task turns this around. The menu says what people want to do, and the department becomes a detail on the page.
Why department menus fail
- People do not know the structure. New colleagues and people in other locations often cannot say who is responsible for what.
- Tasks cross departments. Hiring someone involves HR, IT, finance and the manager. A department menu spreads it over four places.
- The structure changes. Teams are renamed and merged; the menu then lies or needs constant editing.
- Search becomes the only way in. If browsing fails, everyone depends on search, which is a separate problem; see why intranet search is often broken.
Start with the list of tasks
Collect twenty to forty things people actually do on the intranet or ask about. Good sources are:
- the questions that reach HR, IT and the office manager by email and chat,
- the most visited pages, if you have any statistics,
- a short question to colleagues: "What did you last look for and could not find?"
Write each as a verb phrase: "Request leave", "Order equipment", "Find a policy", "Report a problem", "Find a colleague". Avoid names of departments and internal project names.
Card sort with ten colleagues
A card sort is a simple method. You write each task on a card, give the set to a colleague and ask them to group the cards in a way that makes sense to them and to name each group.
- Invite ten people from different teams, locations and seniority. Include at least two new joiners.
- Give each person the same 25 to 40 cards. A paper set or a shared board both work.
- Let them sort alone, without explanation from you. Fifteen to twenty minutes is enough.
- Ask for a name for each group, in their own words.
- Put the results side by side and look for groups that most people created. The names they chose are candidates for the menu labels.
Ten people will not give you statistics, but they will show you clearly where the department view and the user view differ. Count roughly: if seven out of ten put "Request leave" and "Report sick" together, they belong together.
Seven items, not twenty
Reduce the result to about seven top-level items. The number is not magic, but it forces decisions. A typical outcome looks like this:
- Start here: for new joiners, the first week, the basics.
- Time off and working time: leave, sickness, working hours, travel.
- Money and purchasing: expenses, invoices, ordering, budgets.
- IT and equipment: access, devices, problems, software requests.
- Policies and rules: the official documents, in one place.
- People and teams: the directory, teams, who to ask.
- News and events: announcements, company calendar.
Your list will differ. The test is that a colleague can say, for any common task, which item to open without hesitation. Where two items could both fit, either merge them or add a clear signpost.
Label with plain words
Use the words people used in the card sort. "Time off" beats "Absence management". If your industry has a term everyone knows, keep it; if not, avoid internal jargon and abbreviations.
Keep the same label everywhere: in the menu, in the page title, in links from other pages and in the search results. Inconsistent labels are the quiet reason why people stop trusting navigation.
What to retire
A new menu fails when the old structure survives next to it. Before the switch, go through the existing pages and decide for each one:
- Keep and move to the right place in the new structure.
- Merge with a page that covers the same task.
- Retire pages nobody has visited for a year or that describe a process that no longer exists.
Retire the old menu items on the day of the switch, not "later". Where an address changes, set up a redirect for a few months, so saved links and old emails still work. Pages without an owner are the main candidates for removal; see how to give intranet pages an owner and a review date.
Test with five real tasks
Before you publish, ask five people who were not in the card sort to do five tasks, for example "Find out how to order a monitor" or "Find the form for a business trip". Do not help. Note where they hesitate and which item they open first.
If three or more people open the wrong item for the same task, change the label or the position, not the person. Repeat the test with the fix. One round usually removes most problems.
Keep it that way
- Name one person who approves new top-level items; everything else goes under the existing seven.
- Once or twice a year, repeat a short test with a handful of tasks.
- Watch what people search for. Frequent searches for something the menu should cover are a signal to adjust labels. If adoption stays low even with a good menu, look at why employees do not use the intranet.
Common mistakes
- Copying the org chart and renaming it "Departments".
- Adding an eighth, ninth and tenth item "just for this one team".
- Labels in internal jargon that only the authors understand.
- Running the card sort only with managers or only with the project team.
- Leaving the old menu in place after the launch.
- Skipping the test with real tasks.
Summary
A task-based intranet menu starts with a list of what people do, a card sort with about ten colleagues and a limit of seven top-level items. Plain labels, a clear decision about every old page and a short test with five tasks complete the work. The department does not disappear; it becomes the owner of the page, not the entrance to it.
Sources
- Our related articles linked above.
- The card-sort procedure and the limit of seven items are common practice in information architecture, used here as a practical guide for small and mid-sized companies, not as a formal standard. No client results or market figures are claimed in this article.