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We are deep into planning our all new SharePoint ecosystem in O365.  One of the things I'm trying to get my arms around is the right approach for aggregating news and simplifying navigation. 

Prior to the new SharePoint Home page with News, we had planned on somehow aggregating news from across sites to the Intranet home page.  The SP home experience also makes it easier to move the user through the navigation challenges of an Intranet, various team sites, and Microsites for internal promotional programs.  Having the new home page makes all this a lot easier.  THANK YOU SHAREPOINT TEAM!!!

Mark-Kashman do you have any perspective about where the sweet-spot is for a count of sites that a user "favorites"  where things start to get out of control for them?  Meaning where there's too many sites in their list to reasonably interact with them? 

Our plan is to have the following buckets for sites:

• Intranet of official information & communication - Communication Site
• Your Department's Team Site
• Other Departments/Channels you're interested in, and are following - News articles they publish on their "public" page as opposed to their intra-dept Team Site.
• The Work Team(s) you are assigned to - Team Sites
• Special operational project(s)s you are helping out with, or have volunteered for - Team Sites
• Committees or social groups you either participate in (Team Sites), or are generally interested in by favoriting their "public" page
• Internal short-term promotional and change-management sites - Publishing sites

For the average user, this would be a total count of 10 or less sites.  Some people may need up to 50, and others may just simply go overboard with favoriting everything because they're cray-cray and think they'll miss something.

I'm essentially trying to figure out:

a) Is this is too many sites/things to have on the SharePoint home?  I know you'll only see those you have permission for, but quite a few of our users will have access to all.

b) What guidance should we give users around how many is too many for them to favorite?

c) Have you guys done any user experience testing around this, that might help us understand the ins and outs of planning a good SP Home Experience?

It does seem like site naming is critical, color coding may also be helpful, and the icons that show-up on the SP home as the little site identifier bug could also help out a lot.

Any other tips?? All guidance is appreciated!