What makes SharePoint UX good?Presented by Thomas Daly

About Me

• Senior SharePoint Consultant Extraordinaire• B&R Business Solutions

• Branding & Developer

• Focused on the UI side of things

• Community Involvement• Speaker

• NJ SharePoint User Group Organizer

• SharePoint Saturday NYC Organizer

• SharePoint Saturday NJ Organizer

• My SharePoint Blog

Overview

• What is UX?

• What defines good UX?

• Evaluation Criteria for SharePoint UX

• Key Tips from the Field

• The Future of SharePoint & Office 365 UX

What is UX?

• UX is the short for User Experience

• UX is the experience that the user has while interacting with your X

• It’s more about how the user feels when they use your X

• Many different parts compose the UX, no “one things” makes it

• UX is NOT the interface or design of your X

UI is not UX and

UX is not UI

So then what is UI?

• UI is short for User Interface

• It’s what you see in the browser• Help messages, buttons, modals, characters, style, menus, navigation, pages

• UI is an incredibly important part of UX

What makes for a good UX?

The User Experience Honeycomb

• Useful. As practitioners, we can’t be content to paint within the lines drawn by managers. We must have the courage and creativity to ask whether our products and systems are useful, and to apply our knowledge of craft + medium to define innovative solutions that are more useful.

• Usable. Ease of use remains vital, and yet the interface-centered methods and perspectives of human-computer interaction do not address all dimensions of web design. In short, usability is necessary but not sufficient.

• Desirable. Our quest for efficiency must be tempered by an appreciation for the power and value of image, identity, brand, and other elements of emotional design.

• Findable. We must strive to design navigable web sites and locatable objects, so users can find what they need.

• Accessible. Just as our buildings have elevators and ramps, our web sites should be accessible to people with disabilities (more than 10% of the population). Today, it’s good business and the ethical thing to do. Eventually, it will become the law.

• Credible. Thanks to the Web Credibility Project, we’re beginning to understand the design elements that influence whether users trust and believe what we tell them.

• Valuable. Our sites must deliver value to our sponsors. For non-profits, the user experience must advance the mission. With for-profits, it must contribute to the bottom line and improve customer satisfaction.

PETER MORVILLEhttp://semanticstudios.com/user_experience_design/

How can we evaluate SharePoint / O365 UX?

As a Platform

• Enterprise platform in which you can build upon

• Performs seemingly endless functions

• A Content Management System on steroids

• At the mercy of Microsoft

• The ability to change whatever you don’t like or expand upon it.

As your Implementation

• “Your Corporate Intranet”

• What your organization decides to implement to enhance user productivity

• Providing consistent information to the workforce

• Increasing productivity through building components, tools, forms, workflows, lists, and libraries

We can evaluate SP/O365 in two ways: as a platform & as your implementation

Valuable

• The core of the honey comb – people wouldn’t use it, if there was no value behind it.

• SharePoint get’s most of it’s UX points from this category

• SharePoint has survived in an industry where things go cold as quickly as they become hot. This longevity is due to the fact that organizations are receiving value from this product.

• SharePoint highest value comes from function as a content management and information delivery system

• SharePoint ability to be customize and integrate with other systems

Usable

• Are your pages laid out clearly and consistently throughout the site?

• Can the user’s get around with in the site and achieve the goals they need to meet?

• Are the web parts and components functioning as expected?

• Do you have the correct permissions?

• Are all connected services up and running consistently?

• Are you error checking and gracefully handling custom coding errors?

Credible

• SharePoint & O365 have built in credibility passed along from your organization.

• If your organization is credible, then the perceived credibility of your Intranet will start around the same level.

• You can only lose credibility by not having information update to date, by posting information late, or having gaps in content

• Credibility will increase when users believe that they can go to the intranet and see up-to-date information / content

• Having content authors - owning, maintaining lists/libraries, links

Useful

• Are you building and implementing the right pieces that provide a direct benefit to the user?

• Are you leveraging enough of the core features that the product has to offer [Search, Reporting, User Profiles, Social, Yammer?, Workflows, Skype?, OneDrive?]

• Are you streamlining business processes to increase productivity?

• Are you collecting and monitoring user activity?

Findable

• Are employees able to get what they need in a timely and efficient manner?

• How well is your navigation structured? Did you spend the upfront time in planning your information architecture?

• Are you tagging documents & using consistent metadata across your site?

• Are you defining content types?

• Are you using enterprise search? And is it configured and working properly?

• Make use of managed properties, search synonyms, and search web parts.

Desirable

• Does your site invoke any feeling within the user to want to return?

• Have you overhauled the out of the box interface in a positive way?

• Are you creating apps/web parts within in the recommended patterns and practices laid out by Microsoft?

• Are you maintain a consistent look and feel or is each component different?

Accessible

• Can users access your intranet from their work location?

• Are you supporting all of the latest modern browsers or a subset?

• Are you supporting a variety of devices other than desktop/laptop? Tablets? Phones? BYOD?

• Can users from remote networks accessible the intranet?

• How many hoops does the user have to jump through to make a connection?

• Can users with visual, hearing, speech, dexterity, and other cognitive needs utilize your intranet?

How does your SharePoint measure up?

Tips from the battle field for developing a better UX

Focus on Purpose

• Too much thought is spent on UI and making things look prettier

• Make sure to spend enough time on the why (do we need this) and how (will it work)

• The majority of users care about things that work than flashiness

• Reel in your designers – they don’t think about how things work but only how it looks on the page

• Don’t be sold a flashy image without think about how it will work and how will you maintain it

Define Content Owners

• Identify who will own sections of your intranet (prior to launching)• Make sure these people know that they have a new responsibility

• Make sure these people are trained in the ‘how’

• Keep content fresh – specifically if you have an “informational” type site. • Stale content means no one cares – or you’re not doing anything

• Users can lose interest quick if your site seem ‘stale’

• When latest documents are released make sure they are first added to your sites (don’t wait)

Enabling User Interaction

• Enable some of the social features like ratings and comments.

• These can help with search relevancy and improving findability

• Users know they are being monitored and will (typically) self-police themselves

• Provide mechanism for users to report feedback to the site and/or content admins

• Community Template – good for FAQs or Site Help [Forum]

• Use Yammer or User Profiles – let users build profiles with pictures

Utilize Search

• Make sure search is operational and crawling your content periodically

• Test queries and verify that you are getting results periodically

• Use search analytics to see what your users are looking for

• To improve findability use content types and tag with a managed meta data.

• Lastly make sure you’re sensitive information is secure!!!

Use Development Patterns & Practices

• Check out the Office Dev – Patterns and Practices (PnP)• http://dev.office.com/patterns-and-practices

• Check out the Office UI Fabric• http://dev.office.com/fabric

• Try to build client side web parts or apps over traditional C#

• Use REST, JSOM, AJAX, & loaders

• Try, catch and handle your coding errors

• Don’t customize the out of the box display templates, page Layouts or master pages – make your own!

• Beware of the branding tax – you can pay now or you can pay later

The Future of SharePoint UX

Everything is Subject to Change…and it will

Most Recent Change – Document Library

• Microsoft Document Library

A ton of new features

• UX alignment with OneDrive

• Aligning the user experience so they don’t need to learn how to use a library differently

• Responsive – works the same on a mobile phone

• Modernized meta data entry –it’s quicker and more seamless

• Resize, Move, & Hide Columns

• Link Sharing

• File Pinning

• Recent Activity Panel

• Right click for context menu

• A new Grid View

• Create Links to other files

• New Image Preview Viewer

• Details pane shows meta data

New Home Page for O365

• Simpler, responsive design

• Immediate access to all your online applications

• New tool tips help

• Recent applications

• Seamless Office install

What else…

• The user experience will change, it has to in order to compete

• Expect to see responsive improvements

• Expect cleaner, simpler interfaces

UI as a Service

• Subscription based model

• No need to pay for expensive consultants to implement the service, maintenance, or customize it

• Installs right on top of SharePoint or Office 365

• 100% mobile solutions

• Can help increase user adoption by simplifying the interface

Examples of UIaaS

Collaboration, file-sharing and social made easy, effortless and mobile

Beezy offers the most comprehensive set of features delivered in one unique and elegant User Experience

Examples of UIaaS

Boost adoption, mobile, enhanced collaboration

The Future of SharePoint

https://resources.office.com/en-us-landing-the-future-of-sharepoint.html

• SharePoint Saturday New York

• Free Event, open to public

• All Day Training – 55 speakers from around the globe.

• 7 simultaneous sessions training sessions to choose from

• Business, Management, Cloud, IT Pro, Admin, End User, Development

• Saturday, July 30, 2016 from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM (EDT)

• Microsoft, Times Square

• http://www.spsevents.org/city/NYC/NYC2016

Contact

• Blog - www.thomasdaly.net

• Twitter - @_tomdaly_

• Email• Personal: tom.m.daly@gmail.com• Business: tdaly@bandrsolutions.com

• New Jersey SharePoint / Office 365 User Group• 4th Tuesday of each Month• 6:30pm – 8:00pm• Microsoft, Iselin, NJ • www.njspug.com

Resources

• Search Analytics

• New Analytics in SharePoint 2013

• 5 ways to improve Accessibility

• Accessibility in SharePoint 2013

• What is UX Design? 15 Users Experience Experts Weigh In

• Changes to the SharePoint Document Library

• SharePoint Document Library UI? – article summarizing Yammer IT Pro Network post of Lincoln DeMaris

• O365 Help - Microsoft Document Library

• New Home Page for Office 365

• Beezy

• SimplySo