The document provides an overview of building mega menus for internal team site navigation in SharePoint. It outlines the planning, research, design, and building process for mega menus. The key steps include: 1) Planning by examining content, analyzing taxonomy, and creating mockups to define the information architecture and structure. 2) Researching examples of mega menus from companies like Sears, Gander Mountain, and Boston University IT to inform the design. 3) Creating concept drawings and designing the menu layout, color scheme, and visual style to match the portal while adding graphical interest. 4) Evaluating the design for quality, functionality, and user experience before implementation.

1. BUILDING MEGA MENUS FOR
INTERNAL TEAM SITE
NAVIGATION
SharePoint Saturday Baltimore
Liz Killian

2. ABOUT ME
• Web Developer/programmer at the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School
of Public Health
• Working with SharePoint since
2003,
Most of the time I work with out of
the box solutions

3. SESSION OUTLINE
• Scenario
• Goals &
Requirements
• Benefits &
Challenges
Planning
• Research
• Examples
• Concept
Drawings
• Design
• Evaluate
Building
• Implement in
Production?
• Questions
Conclusion

4. PLANNING
How well you plan makes a HUGE difference in the outcome

5. SCENARIO
• Site Collection with a deep tree
• Contents need to be reorganized without
causing so much chaos
• Old data needs to live with new projects
• How does a new employee find their way
around?
• People are complaining they can’t find or
navigate to the information they want
• They want a less “SharePoint-y” solution

6. GOALS & REQUIREMENTS
Goals
• Improve findability
• Improve productivity
• Make it welcoming
• Flexible design to allow for change
Requirements
• Examine the content – this should drive the design
• Analyze the taxonomy - create a layout (mockup),
Architect your information
• Figure out the breakpoints - structure the categories
• Follow web conventions (match style of current portal)
• Design should take ALL users into consideration

7. BENEFITS & CHALLENGES
- All options are in one spot
- Allows you to group together items into different
categories
- A site collection owner who knows HTML can do this
- Gives you the ability to add visual interest to the page
- Web part page is 2013 compliant
- Did we get all of it (will all of it fit?)
- Naming of the categories can be really tricky
- You have to maintain the HTML
- Pretty does NOT fix poor organization or lack of content
- Styling may need to be different

8. JUST A FEW NOTES
• Does not respect the permissions of
SharePoint.
• Users Spend Most of their time
collaborating on their own team sites
– Don’t expect this to quiet all the
SharePoint nay-sayers.
• Last but biggest note – This is a fake
solution. I did not have to work with
any real stakeholders which could
impact the design.

9. BUILDING

10. RESEARCH
Define the
audience
Analyze
content
Define gaps
Identify
improvements

11. MEGA MENU
Large Panel divided into groups of
navigational options
Covers large
space
Less scrolling Layout Counts

12. SEARS

13. GANDER MOUNTAIN

14. BOSTON UNIVERSITY IT

15. Create Outline Baslmiq Mockup
CONCEPT DRAWINGS

16. DESIGN
Color Scheme - Visual style should match
that of the portal
Feel & Mood - Consistent with rest of the
portal
Adding Impact - Include images to increase
graphical interest

17. EVALUATE
Quality
assurance
(Make sure
the graphics
guy looks at it
again ;)
Ensuring
system
functionality
Testing for
design
flaws
Refining
user
experience
Ensuring
return on
investment
Predict user
adoption

18. QUESTIONS?