Part 2 of Part II: UX through SharePoint-colored glasses
(Recommended reading: Start with the first part of this rather lengthy post. You’ll be glad you did. You wouldn’t haved wanted to start Games of Thrones with Season 2, now would you? Well, maybe if you were a big Ned Stark fan, I’d get that, but… oh, right.)
Believe it or not, SharePoint is designed to be as user-friendly as possible. According to legend (as well as my own experience browsing their employee directory), Microsoft has a significant investment in user experience designers hard at work on their software products. If you doubt me, check out a Windows Phone—it’s a better UX than any Android phone I’ve seen, and arguably better than Apple’s. (Why? We’ll discuss that in a future post.)
That said, Microsoft is designing products that are meant to be versatile and adaptable. SharePoint needs to work as well for the hometown insurance agency down the street as it does for multinational conglomerates. Essentially, Microsoft accomplishes this by shipping SharePoint in what we can truthfully consider a template format.
It’s there from the moment you finish the install wizard—it’s got all of the functionality and features you need—but it’s blank, and just waiting to be filled in with your own specific information/branding/thinking/working.
The true SharePoint professional acknowledges this—admitting the UX limitations of “out of the box” or “naked” SharePoint—and accepts that any solution will need some configuration and development time to truly meet the needs of the audience (or more often, varied audiences). At the same time, there are notable features native to SharePoint that truly enhance the experience of any user. I’m personally partial to these three:
- The Ribbon interface. Love it or hate it (and most people who hate it were just too used to Office XP), it provides a consistent UX for users of Office, which is even more widespread than SharePoint. In its most basic form, if you can edit a Word doc, you can edit a SharePoint site.
- Integration with Lync Server. Wouldn’t it improve the user experience, you say, to see someone’s name attached to a document or article on your screen and, needing an answer or having a comment, you just call their phone up from your laptop? Well, you can do that from SharePoint. OOB, baby.
- SharePoint Search 2010. SharePoint 2010 intranets provide specific, on-point search results that can be refined and filtered for even more flexibility. I have better luck on a SharePoint intranet than I ever had doing internet searches with Google.com. (Full disclosure: I use Bing now.)
As I said, these are just three of my own favorites, but there are others. SharePoint has a lot of great tools that can be leveraged in building a solid User Experience. You just need to (a) know they’re there, and (b) how to leverage them.
Navigating Around the Barriers
With all of that said, on both sides of the coin, still the biggest impediment to SharePoint usability is SharePoint itself. This platform, as much as I love it, just does too many things and offers too many options for potential users to digest at once. Apple may not have invented the concept of simplicity, but they’ve surely hammered home its importance as a fundamental principle of making technology useful and easy to understand.
When approaching SharePoint with the intent of providing a good user experience, it’s essential to accept that it will never be a simple, single-use application. It can certainly be a collection of simple, useful apps bound together by a common framework. That should be the goal of the User Experience Designer and the SharePoint Architect alike—creating a solution that works for everyone, easily, but provides specifically tailored services to many different personas and scenarios.
That’s a reasonable goal—as long as you understand both sides.
We’ll pick this topic up again soon with what’s sure to become Hermione Granger’s favorite blog post, SharePoint UX: A History.
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