# If they cannot find it in five minutes, you do not have an intranet > Can employees find what they need on SharePoint in five minutes? If not, you have a publishing system, not an intranet. Hubs and makeovers will not fix that. Canonical: https://www.dexy.cloud/insights/intranet-findability-five-minutes Can employees find what they need on your SharePoint intranet in five minutes? If employees cannot find it in five minutes, you do not have an intranet. You have a publishing system. A new homepage will not change that. A chatbot on the same maze will not change that. The test is the task: can someone get the current answer, even when they do not know which team owns it or which tool it sits in? If the answer is no, stop arguing about the look of the front door until you can pass that test. Look still matters. It is not the test. I sat with people whose job was to find the approved methodology before a client conversation. The homepage looked finished. Search still returned three versions of the same pack. They opened Teams and asked a named colleague. The current answer lived in one library. Everything else was a rumor. That is the five-minute test. The look was not the failure. ## Why do intranet makeovers fail the five-minute test? Most intranet programs look fine in the steering pack. The architecture diagram is tidy. The homepage has news. Someone has said “single source of truth” on a slide. There may even be a new hub, because last year’s pages were a mess and a hub sounds like a strategy. Then a fee earner tries to find the current expenses guidance and asks a colleague instead. That is not a culture problem. That is a task problem. Internal comms often hear it in the survey: the intranet is terrible *again*. Leadership has seen the comments. Last year’s tweak did not stick. The mandate becomes “make it look like we care before the next cycle.” To be fair, that mandate is real. Employees do notice when the internal site looks like leftover software and the public site looks like a firm. A hiring CIO will say the designed examples look like websites. That is trust. Trust without a path is still a pretty dead end. Makeovers fail the test when they only change: - the homepage layout - the color of the news cards - the label on a hub that still points at the same pile - search, while the pages are still named for departments None of those give an employee five minutes to an answer they did not already know how to find. ## What does “find it in five minutes” mean? Let’s pull that apart: 1. An employee has a job to finish. 2. They do not know which team owns the answer. 3. They do not know whether it lives in SharePoint, Teams, or “that other system.” 4. They will spend about five minutes. Then they will ping a person. The five minutes is not a slogan. It is the window before the intranet loses to chat. If finding the thing takes six clicks under the owning department’s name, they will not do it twice. They will learn a colleague’s name instead. You will call that “collaboration.” It is a workaround. Now. You are not missing a theme. You are not missing another hub. You are missing a path. That path is [information architecture](/topics/intranet-discovery-and-ia): what belongs where, in the language employees already use, before you rebuild. ## What does the usual SharePoint setup get wrong? The process everyone knows is tidy. Each department publishes under its own name. The homepage performs news. Search is supposed to mop up the rest. Easy. Everyone knows where they are. The employee does not. Department names are how you organize people. They are a weak way to organize answers. Most staff have no interest in how HR is structured. They want the current policy, the template, the “how we do this here.” Then the firm grows. A few hundred people, more than one site, SharePoint plus at least one other repository. Typical failure looks like this: - the same guidance exists in three places, two of them stale - page templates do not match, so nothing looks like “the real one” - ownership is a rumor - Teams and a specialist repository hold the useful version; SharePoint holds the official-looking empty one - someone proposes a portal so people can “find everything in one place” Obviously, what you need in that situation is another website. You already have one. It is not doing the job. A second front door on the same pile does not create five minutes. It creates a choice: which wrong place first? Chatbots do not need to replace navigation. If the content is a mess, the answers will be a mess. Sort out the path before you add a place to ask the path to explain itself. ## Where should content live: SharePoint, Teams, or another tool? This is not a full information-architecture model. You do not need one to start. You need a rule you can defend in a meeting. A full plan is [intranet discovery and information architecture](/topics/intranet-discovery-and-ia) - that sits under [digital workplace strategy and AI](/services/digital-workplace-strategy-and-ai). - **Approved answers many people need** belong where people already look for “how we do this.” That is usually the intranet, in language they would search, with an owner - not a department shrine. - **Working files for a team this week** can live in Teams. - **Specialist material for one function** can stay in the specialist tool. The intranet should not pretend that material lives on a page nobody opens. It should say where it lives, once, and point. Do it once. Point to it many times. Do not copy it into three sites because three owners were in the room. ## How do you audit without boiling the ocean? Do not start with “what have we got?” Start with the tasks that keep failing the five-minute test. Typical starters: - expenses and the current policy - onboarding (“what do I do in week one?”) - the template that exists in four versions - the how-to people keep asking a named colleague for Those earn their place. The rest can wait, or go. A usable pass looks like this: 1. List the tasks employees actually fail, in their words (search logs, survey comments, the questions that hit comms and IT). 2. For each task, find every copy of the answer. Keep one. Point to it. Delete or archive the rest. 3. Name the page in the language they search, not the team’s org chart. 4. Put the path on the homepage and in navigation as a task, not as a department. 5. Check the five minutes with someone who does not already know where it lives. If the list of failed tasks is long, or SharePoint vs other tools is the real fight, that is [discovery and IA](/topics/intranet-discovery-and-ia) - scoped as [strategy work](/services/digital-workplace-strategy-and-ai) before a build. ## Does the intranet still need to look like a website? This is not an argument for ugly SharePoint. The front door has to look like it belongs to a firm that bills for professional work. People decide in seconds whether a place is serious. Default SharePoint often fails that in one glance. Designed examples that look like websites are how you stop losing them before the task starts. You are not decorating. You are making the first five seconds honest enough that they will spend the next five minutes. If you only do the look, you will get a week of compliments and the same ping-a-colleague behavior. If you only do the structure, and the thing still looks like a settings panel, a lot of fee earners will not give it the five minutes. Both have to work: - **Design** so they trust the place enough to try - **Structure** so the try succeeds in five minutes The test is still the five minutes. You do not need another hub before the next survey. You need the top tasks to work, in the language people already use, in the place they already open. That is not everything you could fix. It is enough to be getting on with. ## Frequently asked questions ### What is the five-minute intranet test? The five-minute intranet test asks whether an employee can find the current, approved answer in about five minutes, even when they do not know which team owns it or which tool it sits in. If they cannot, you have a publishing system, not an intranet. ### Will a new SharePoint homepage make the intranet findable? No. A new homepage can help people trust the front door. It does not create a path to the answer. If the task still sits six clicks under a department name, employees will ping a colleague instead. ### Can a chatbot fix a messy SharePoint intranet? No. If the content is duplicated, unowned, or named in department language, a chatbot will remix the mess. Sort out the path and answer the need once before you add another place to ask. ### Should everything live in SharePoint? No. Approved answers many people need usually belong on the intranet. Working files can live in Teams. Specialist material can stay in a specialist tool, as long as the intranet points to it once instead of copying it. ### Does findability mean the intranet can look like default SharePoint? No. Employees decide in seconds whether a place is serious. Default SharePoint often fails that glance. Design earns the first five seconds. The five-minute test is still whether they can complete the task. If you are rebuilding a SharePoint intranet around that test - structure, findability, and a front door people trust - that is [intranet design and build](/services/intranet-design-and-build). If you still need to decide what belongs where, start with [intranet discovery and IA](/topics/intranet-discovery-and-ia) and [digital workplace strategy](/services/digital-workplace-strategy-and-ai).