Branding Wont Fix Crappy Content - SharePoint User Experience Discussion

Branding And User Experience Discussion December 5, 2009 Prepared for SharePoint Saturday DC by Marcy Kellar

Branding Lead at CDW responsible for branding, web content management, and usability Diverse background in life sciences, psychology, data management and technology Over four years experience in SharePoint architecture design, branding & implementation Marcy Kellar Over twenty years experience in fine art and visual design

Crappy content What Is It? What does that mean to you? Examples of branding issues that lead to “crappy content” The User experience (UX) elements Mapping UX elements back to SharePoint

Photo by marcykellar, flickr

SharePoint Branding We’ll Call This “Content”

What is asked for What Keeps Me Up At Night

“Brand the site to get users “Take this home page excited about using design and apply it to the SharePoint” new intranet. “We are pretty sure that we “Make the site really are only using publishing pop now and we’ll templates for our intranet” figure out the content later” “No, we don’t have any customizations or embedded styling”

Why this is a problem:  Content is required for functional tests  Impacts information design Let’s work out a schedule “Make the site really pop for functional testing with now and we’ll figure out the real content. content later” What you can do:  No Lorem Ipsum – Use real content in mockup  Show examples  Help client understand risk  Document risk  Build a bounds test environment

Why this is a problem:  Home Page does not address all areas of SharePoint  Undiscovered design decisions Let’s walk through a SharePoint site and “Take this home page discuss how your design design and apply it to the in areas besides the new intranet. home page. What you can do: • Walk through areas not covered • Document visual requirements

Why this is a problem:  Users come to site for content, not dazzle.  Content often drives visual design requirements. “Brand the site to get users excited about using I need a better SharePoint” understanding of the business requirements driving your redesign What you can do:  Walk through inspirational & competitor sites  Understand project goals  Be prepared with examples of sites that work  Be prepared with examples of content conundrums

Why this is a problem:  Branding won’t fix a site’s credibility, search, usability, etc “Brand the site to get Let’s review all of the areas users excited about using that seem to be impacting SharePoint” user adoption and see what we can fix with visual design. What you can do:  Review project objectives  Understand site goals  Set realistic expectations  Become a user advocate  Educate yourself on elements of user experience

Why this is a problem:  Overrides custom branding  Hard-coded table widths  Misuse of Test/bugfix hours “No, we don’t have SharePoint will actually tell us any customizations or everything we will get a report embedded styling” of any customizations. generated by this cool tool, SharePoint Spider. What you can do:  Task client with reviewing content  Proactively include MS Word overrides  Use SharePoint Spider tool to ID customized pages

Why this is a problem:  Current state of site is undefined or unclear  Not all site templates handle branding the same “We are pretty sure Let’s get an accurate picture that we are only using of your environment’s publishing templates landscape with the report for our intranet” generated by this cool tool, SharePoint Spider. What you can do:  Generate a site map using Visio  Generate site report by using SharePoint Spider

• Created by: Tom Dietz, Sr. SharePoint Architect • Reports: information that impacts branding • Format: portable format (csv) • Scope: Web App DOWNLOAD SPIDER

1. Download Spider 2. Unzip contents to c directory 3. Review readme.txt for more info 4. Open command prompt 5. c: spider http://yoursitename.com >yourdesiredfilename.csv

To SharePoint Branding Success

 Site Templates  Site Collections  Other designs  Site Definitions Photo by monicAl, flickr

 Untested features  Testing branding  Hard-coded widths  Train content authors Photo Courtesy of Tarja_, flickr

 First, Content  Organize content into taxonomies and hierarchies  Design Navigation

 Clear visual hierarchy  Rule of Thirds  Design Elements and Principles  Gestalt Principles Photo by Liz Bartlett, flickr

Proximity Similarity Continuity Closure Common Fate Symmetry

• Follow Web Conventions • Site Actions Menu Photo Courtesy of Mike Owens, flickr

Users spend most of their time on other sites Jakob's Law of the Web User Experience

Eye Tracking Studies

Photo Courtesy of noamgaala, flickr

User Experience (UX) is the quality of experience a person has when interacting with a specific design. ~www.uxnet.org

Become a user advocate

“Over the last year online banking has attracted 6.3 million users, but a massive 3.1 million of those have closed their accounts already due to poor website design and inefficient service. ” (Internet Money Issue 4) “World-wide productivity loss due to bad intranet usability is about one trillion dollars per year.” (Coyne et al) “The cost to business of poor user experience and satisfaction is equivalent to $40,000 per person in lost business each year, based on one hour a day being spent sorting out software usability problems (Marketing Opinion Research International/MORI)”

Jesse James Garrett, 2000

UXNet Podcast UIE Slimwiki Adaptive Path Podcast Boxes and Arrows

Doing a Content Inventory (Or, a Mind-Numbingly Detailed Odyssey Through Your Web Site)” “The Content Inventory Is Your Friend” Eye-tracking studies by the Poynter Institute Eye-tracking studies by Jakob Nielsen Where users expect to find standard web page components Introduction to Good Usability – Downloadable ebook Elements of User Experience

Resources and epiphanies in 140 characters or less. http://thesharepointmuse.com

http://www.thesharepointmuse.com	308
http://parsimonias.wordpress.com	50
http://www.slideshare.net	44
https://enernet.energizer.com	16
http://www.twittertim.es	1
https://angel.canisius.edu	1
http://www.lmodules.com	1

Branding Wont Fix Crappy Content - SharePoint User Experience Discussion

by Marcy Kellar on Dec 10, 2009

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Branding Wont Fix Crappy Content - SharePoint User Experience Discussion — Presentation Transcript