ICT role in 21st century education and its challenges
Creating a Great User Experience in SharePoint
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3. Co-Founder and President of Sympraxis Consulting LLC,
located in the Boston suburb of Newton, MA, USA.
Sympraxis focuses on enabling collaboration throughout the
enterprise using the SharePoint application platform.
Over 30 years of experience in technology professional
services and software development. Over a wide-ranging
career in consulting as well as line manager positions, Marc
has proven himself as a problem solver and leader who can
solve difficult technology problems for organizations across
a wide variety of industries and organization sizes.
Author of SPServices
Awarded Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server 2011-2016
4. Use SharePoint as an out-of-box application whenever
possible - We designed the new SharePoint UI to be
clean, simple and fast and work great out-of-box. We
encourage you not to modify it which could add
complexity, performance and upgradeability and to focus
your energy on working with users and groups to
understand how to use SharePoint to improve
productivity and collaboration and identifying and
promoting best practices in your organization.
SharePoint
Microsoft Doesn't Advise You Customize SharePoint 2013
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/information-management/microsoft-doesnt-advise-you-customize-sharepoint-2013-016608.php
5. User experience (UX or UE) involves a person's
emotions about using a particular product, system or
service. User experience highlights the experiential,
affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-
computer interaction and product ownership.
How does the user feel when they are
finished with using SharePoint?
“User experience” from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience
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7. The Form v Function Ratio by Dan Antion http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/The-Form-v-Function-Ratio
8. The consumer Web is both a source of
inspiration and an anathema for
enterprise developers
Our users expect no less than what
they see on Facebook, Dropbox,
Google, etc.
It’s an expectations problem
Image from The Conversation Prism http://www.theconversationprism.com/
9. A sound Information
Architecture provides:
Consistency
Simpler maintenance
One version of the truth
Use wisely:
Content Types
Managed metadata
List-based Site Columns
Image from “Explain IA Poster” http://userallusion.com/blog/2010/10/explain-ia-poster/
10. Don’t think about what SharePoint does or
how it does it. Think about what your users
want.
Too many developers eschew SharePoint as a
collaboration tool. Use what you build.
If it’s too slow or cumbersome to you, guess
what? It’s worse for your users.
11. Sit with your users
Listen to what they are asking for
Repeat what they want
Iterate, iterate, iterate
Lather, rinse, repeat – It’s never “done”
Agile with a small “a” – roll with the punches
12. Don’t expect your users to understand all
functionality
Training can’t cover everything –demonstrate
patterns
Be an internal consultant
“How can I help you to solve your
requirements?”
13. Questions to ask:
Can a relatively inexperienced technophobe
make sense of this?
Do we feel like people will need training?
Why?
How often will they use it?
Is it visually appealing?
Is it “accessible”?
14. Create a frictionless experience
Prefill everything you can based
on context
Add some coolness
Remember the power of good IA
15. Your end users don’t care about your budget
Figure out how to help them
Look for quick wins – they can help fund the
big changes
Decide if the workloads SharePoint supports
are important enough
Find executive support
16. •Two Seconds
Boston Globe, February 02, 2013: Instant gratification is making us perpetually impatient ow.ly/i8Pth
Ramesh Sitaraman, a computer
science professor at UMass
Amherst, examined the viewing
habits of 6.7 million Internet users
in a study released in 2012. How
long were subjects willing to be
patient?
Do you think that’s gotten any longer?
17. Views should show the amount of
information required to make decisions,
no more
Carefully balance server side and client
side code
Large images can kill the UX
18. Whether you aim at mobile or
now, you must have a mobile
strategy
Understand your population
Images courtesy: Method IT, TechNet
19. Know your user base
Browsers
Brands
Versions
Screens
Size
Resolution
Shape
Bandwidth
Available RAM
Image from NetMarketShare – timeframe = Q3 2015
http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0&qptimeframe=Q
“It works on my machine”
doesn’t cut it.
20. If users have to scroll every time they land
on a page, you’ve put things in the wrong
place
Eyes scan from upper left to lower right,
much as a TV “paints” the screen
Image 2: F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content http://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/
21. Decide on your design aesthetic
Few dense pages vs. many sparse pages
Graphics vs. text
Color vs. monochrome
Pet Peeve: Executive images or senseless
banners
22. Please, please, please NEVER:
“Contact your administrator”
Correlation IDs – Good idea, horrible
execution, especially for SharePoint
Online
Tell the user:
What happened?
What did I do to make it happen?
How can I fix it?
23. Remove the developer from the equation
List-Based Settings vs. Property bags
Give users control – it’s their system
Focus on important development work
24. Search is about finding, not searching
Search is not just a search box
Requires regular care and feeding
Use search to drive effects
25. Consistency to a fault - Don’t be constrained by
what SharePoint gives you
Yet, you’ve bought a box, don’t stray too far out
of it
Name it – it’s not SharePoint
Visual cues – not just text
It always comes back to “It Depends”
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27. The Form v Function Ratio by Dan Antion http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/The-Form-v-Function-Ratio