Designing a Modern SharePoint Site: Elevate User Experience and Collaboration

“Modern SharePoint site design” covers more ground than one post can usefully hold, so this one stays narrow: the page-composition layer — the web parts, navigation, and personalization choices that actually shape what a visitor sees and clicks. For the step-by-step of creating and configuring a site in the first place, see A Comprehensive Guide to SharePoint Site Design; for how sites should be structured and connected once there’s more than one, see SharePoint Site Design and Architecture. This post is what to actually put on the page.

In this post: The Hero web part: Tiles, Layers, or Carousel · Mega menu vs. cascading navigation · Personalization via audience targeting · It’s Viva Engage, not Yammer, now · Brand identity without custom code · When would you actually use this? · Related reading

The Hero web part: Tiles, Layers, or Carousel

The Hero web part at the top of a page is the single highest-attention piece of real estate on it, and it has three genuinely different layouts, not one generic “banner” option: Tiles, a grid of one to five clickable tiles that keeps an overall 8:3 shape with images scaling to roughly 4:3 — good for surfacing several distinct destinations at once. Layers, up to five stacked layers with the image set beside the title, able to fill the entire width of the page for a single strong message. And Carousel, the newest of the three, a swipeable slideshow better suited to rotating announcements than a single static message. Picking the wrong one is a common first mistake: Tiles for “several things to click,” Layers for “one thing to say,” Carousel for “several things to say, one at a time.”

Mega menu vs. cascading navigation

Two real navigation styles exist, and the difference matters more once a site has real depth to its content: cascading navigation, the traditional fly-out submenu pattern, one level opening onto the next as you hover or click deeper; and mega menu, which surfaces multiple levels of hierarchy at once in a single expanded panel rather than a chain of fly-outs. Worth knowing before planning around it: mega menu is only available on communication sites and hub sites — it can’t be created on a team site at all, cascading is the only option there. Where it is available, switching is a UI setting, not a rebuild: site settings > Change the look > Navigation > Mega menu > Save, then organizing topics into up to three levels of hierarchy from the navigation editor. It’s the better fit once a site has enough distinct sections that cascading fly-outs turn into a multi-click hunt to find anything; a shallow site is usually better off staying on cascading, where a mega menu panel would just be mostly empty space.

The Yammer web part was rebranded to Viva Engage — if a guide still shows “Add a Yammer web part,” it’s describing an interface that no longer exists under that name.

Personalization via audience targeting

Most content web parts on a modern page — News, Quick Links, and others — support audience targeting the same way the Events web part does: enabled at the list/library level, assigned per item to specific Microsoft 365 or Entra security groups, then switched on in the web part’s own settings before it actually filters anything. The payoff is a genuinely more relevant homepage — a Finance-specific news item only shows to Finance, a regional announcement only shows to that region — rather than every visitor scrolling past content that isn’t for them. The failure mode is the same one worth flagging every time this comes up: enabling it in only one of the two or three required places (list, item, web part) leaves it silently inert rather than throwing an error.

It’s Viva Engage, not Yammer, now

Worth a direct correction since it shows up in a lot of older site-design advice, including this post’s own original version: Microsoft has retired the Yammer brand for this. The Yammer web part, Yammer Embed, and the Yammer.com web experience itself were all renamed to Viva Engage — functionally the same community-conversation feed, just no longer findable in the web part picker under its old name. If you’re following an older tutorial and can’t find “Yammer” in the add-a-web-part search, that’s why — search “Viva Engage” instead, not evidence the feature was removed.

Brand identity without custom code

Matching a site’s colors and fonts to an organization’s brand doesn’t require custom CSS or an SPFx extension for the common case — “Change the look” in the site settings covers theme colors, header layout, navigation style, and footer directly through the UI, and a custom theme built from brand colors applies the same way a built-in one does. For rolling a custom theme out consistently across many sites rather than setting it site-by-site through the UI, that’s a scripted job — see Apply Custom Theme for SharePoint via PowerShell for the `Set-PnPWebTheme` bulk-rollout pattern rather than repeating it here.

When would you actually use this?

A new intranet homepage where the site itself already exists (or is being built per the step-by-step guide) and the actual page composition still needs deciding.
A site that’s grown enough content that its original cascading navigation now takes several clicks to reach anything — a mega menu candidate.
Different departments or regions seeing the same generic homepage content — an audience-targeting candidate, not a case for building separate sites per group.
A rebrand or visual refresh across many sites at once — the PowerShell bulk-theming path, not a manual site-by-site “Change the look” pass.

A Comprehensive Guide to SharePoint Site Design — the step-by-step this post’s composition guidance sits on top of.
SharePoint Site Design and Architecture — structure and hub connections, one layer below page composition.
Apply Custom Theme for SharePoint via PowerShell — scripted branding rollout across many sites.

None of these choices need to be perfect at launch, but the Hero layout, navigation style, and personalization decisions are the ones that actually determine whether people engage with the page or scroll past it — worth getting deliberate about before treating the site as finished.