When it comes to accessing the information that they need, people don’t want miracles. They do, however, want to access the information that they need quickly and with minimal effort.

Structuring your intranet content is a tough task. When you have hundreds of pieces of content, things can get out of hand very quickly.

However it is important to get right. People just won’t access poorly structured, out of date content – no matter how much you tell them to.

But, done right, the information on your intranet can be incredibly useful, so how can you help them find it?

1. Make it searchable

At a basic level, this means thinking carefully about how titles are worded and how they are structured.

Think about what keywords people are going to be using and make sure you include this in your titles and metadata. Titles should have a consistent format throughout the system so they can be easily scanned if they are appearing in a list.

It’s also important that content appears on pages on your intranet, rather than buried in files (like PDFs). At the very least you should include some sort of summary of what the document contains that contains words that people might use to search.

Of course, this assumes that your knowledge centre has a good search function. At Twine, we’re big fans of Elasticsearch.

2. Get content out of PDFs

PDFs are good for storing lots of information and good for printing, but on the web they throw up all kinds of accessibility problems:

• Their contents cannot be searched without being downloaded
• To download them you need a good data connection
• They require an extra step to see their content

My advice is to copy as much content as you can out of your PDFs and publish it on your intranet instead. Modern intranets (like Twine) allow you to post inline images, so things like tables and charts can be published with the content too.

There’s a good article from Gov UK on exactly this topic.

3. Mobile first

When I’m out of the office, I’m likely to need information that is usually available to me when I’m in the office. I want to access this information without having to zoom in and out, wait for pages to load and squint at overly small text.

So, make sure you’re using a system that is mobile friendly, ideally responsive.

4. Practise restraint

The biggest problem that content repositories face is out-of-date content. If content is left to go out of date, it is no longer an accurate and reliable source of information. If it is not a reliable source of information, people won’t trust it and therefore won’t use it.

By keeping the amount of content that is on the system focused and relevant, you will have less content to maintain and less to think about when structuring it.

If you already have a system set up, a good indication can be your analytics – see what content has been accessed in the past year and start trimming back on the content that hasn’t.

And remember:

Design your content for users, keep it manageable and make sure that people can get to the content as quickly as possible. To see how we go about tackling this problem, you can make your own Twine account and see our mobile friendly knowledge centre.

And you can get more content like this at @tweetsbytwine

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