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Privion IA Lab · Intranet research

Stop inventing the intranet menu in a conference room.

We built a lab for card sorts and tree tests so your people tell us how the place should be organized — then we build LightPath, Powell, Omnia, or SharePoint to match.

  • Real employees, not the same six stakeholders
  • Cohorts that don’t get blended into mush
  • Your brand on the study, ours in the footnotes
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The lab, not the lecture

Here’s what it looks like when people drag cards around instead of nodding through a deck. Demo study starring the eternally useful Northwind Health.

Drag. Name. Argue with yourself.

Open card sort with autosave. People invent group names like “Tech help” and “Money” — gold for navigation labels.

Similarity matrix heatmap showing how often participants grouped intranet cards together

The heatmap of “yeah, those go together”

Bright blocks = strong agreement. That’s your intranet sections waving hello before anyone draws a wireframe.

Dendrogram with cut height showing five intranet content clusters from a card sort

Cut the tree. Ship the nav.

Pick a cut height, get clusters. Do it per cohort so Field engineers don’t get averaged into HQ’s mental model.

Sort → cut → prove → build

Four moves. No vision-boarding the mega menu into existence.

  1. 01

    Card sort

    Hand people the real stuff they look for. They group it. You learn which labels survive outside the steering committee.

  2. 02

    See the structure

    Matrices and dendrograms turn “I think HR goes here” into clusters you can defend — including the cards everyone fights over.

  3. 03

    Tree test

    Propose a nav, then make people find things. Wrong first clicks are cheaper now than after you migrate 400 pages.

  4. 04

    Then build

    Only then do we wire LightPath, Powell, Omnia, or SharePoint. Platforms are easy. Wrong structure is expensive.

Why we bothered building this

Because “we did a workshop” kept producing the same intranet nobody could find anything in.

Not sticky-note karaoke

A room of leaders with markers is still a guess — just a collaborative one. The lab fields cohorts at scale and shows who’s stalled mid-sort.

Upstream of the platform fight

LightPath, Powell, Omnia, SharePoint — pick your stack. IA Lab settles the structure before the vendor bake-off becomes a religion.

Boring on privacy (on purpose)

Display name to resume. No email vacuum. No “just one tracking pixel.” Results feed the engagement, not a nurture sequence.

Straight answers

The questions people ask when they’re tired of intranet folklore.

Our own card-sort and tree-test lab for intranet IA. Employees organize content; we turn that into a structure worth building — instead of inventing the menu in a conference room and hoping.

Next step

Got an intranet coming? Bring evidence, not vibes.

Tell us about the tenant, the audiences, and the deadline. We’ll map cohorts, cards, and how findings land in the build — LightPath, Powell, Omnia, or plain SharePoint.

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