Driving SharePoint End-User Adoption: Usability and Performance

1 COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL – DO NOT DISTRIBUTE #Dynatrace
Wendy Neal, SharePoint Consultant, McGladrey
Andreas Grabner, Performance Advocate, Dynatrace
Thursday, March 26
Driving SharePoint End-
User Adoption: Usability and
Performance

SharePoint Site Usability and
User Adoption Tips
Wendy Neal

Wendy Neal
Senior SharePoint Consultant, McGladrey
@SharePointWendy
http://wendy-neal.com
Contributing Author:
• CMSWire
• ITUnity

• Basic Website Usability Concepts
• The Challenges of User Adoption
• Overcoming the Challenges
• Key Points to Remember
Outline

Basic Website Usability Concepts

• According to Steve Krug, websites
should be:
• Self-evident
• Obvious
• Self-explanatory
Rule #1: Don’t Make Me Think
If you remember
nothing else about
usability, remember
this rule!

• Navigation by browsing
• Primary navigation
• Secondary navigation
• Utilities links
• Navigation by Searching
Types of Navigation

SharePoint 2013 Navigation Areas
SearchGlobal Navigation
Quick
Launch
Utilities Menu
Page Title

• Concise and consistent primary
navigation
• Identical no matter where you are
• Max 9 links
• Secondary links relative to where
you’re at
• Active links highlighted
• Page titles match link names
• Breadcrumbs
Navigation Best Practices

• Attract attention
• Good balance of images and text
• Keep content succinct and
uncluttered
• Place important content “above the
fold”
Home Page Design

• Typical minimum screen size is
1024 x 768
• Test your site on different screen
resolutions
• You want to avoid left/right scrolling
at all costs!
• The “fold” will be in different places
depending on screen resolution
Design for Different Screen Sizes

Hyperlink Etiquette
Are you linking to…
New
Window
Same
Window
A site other than
yours?
Someplace within your
site?
• To open in a new window or not, that is the question…

Challenges of User Adoption

• Usability best practices have
likely not been followed
• Lack of content and
information architecture
planning
Site is hard to use or navigate

Users don’t understand the purpose of the site
• Change management plan has
not been created
• Users feel like they don’t have any
say or importance

• Lack of communication or
change management plan
• Lack of evangelism or
excitement
Users don’t know about your site

Users can’t find what they’re looking for
• Search not properly configured/
maintained
• Information architecture and/or
navigation not set up correctly

• No one “owns” the content
• Not enough time, resources to
keep content fresh
Content isn’t kept up to date

Site is slow
• Servers don’t have enough
resources
• Inadequate network bandwidth
• Custom code is not optimized
• Too many web parts on the page
• Bad JavaScript

Overcoming the Challenges

• User-friendly SharePoint sites must be designed with good
usability principles in mind
• Therefore, we must teach our site owners:
• Basic usability concepts
• What they’re responsibilities are
• How to be webmasters of their sites
Provide training to site owners

• Designing the Site/Navigation
• Setting up the information
architecture
• Permissions management
• User Analytics
• Content facilitation
• Assisting users with issues
Example Responsibilities of a Site Owner

Don’t forget the end users
• Create a change management
plan
• Get end users involved early
• Explain how it will make their job
easier (and make sure that it does!)
• Provide end user training

Plan your Information Architecture
• Don’t use folders!
• Utilize metadata, site columns, and
content types, and views
• Don’t just dump all the files on your
shared drive into SharePoint!

• Lunch and learns
• Contests
• Set up user alerts
• Bulletin boards
Promote Your Site

• Announcements
• Did You Know?
• What’s New?
• Quote of the Week
• Team Member Spotlight
Frequent Updates to Content

• Lead by example
• Use SharePoint for your
own processes,
collaboration and
document sharing
Eat Your Own Dog Food

• Observe your users’ frustrations and
pain points
• Be proactive by using a tool to
monitor performance and user
satisfaction
Watch your users

Key Points to Remember

Key Points
• SharePoint sites have the capability of being user-
friendly, IF they are designed properly
• Organizations need to provide SharePoint training
as well as teach site owners how to be “webmasters”
of their sites
• And lastly…

Anything that confuses or frustrates users WILL
affect user adoption
• Sites that have poor usability
• Sites without a clear purpose
• Sites that are slow
This includes:

SharePoint Performance Health:
Checks Beyond CPU and Memory
Andreas Grabner, Performance
Advocate, Dynatrace

Andreas Grabner
Dynatrace Developer Advocate
@grabnerandi
http://blog.dynatrace.com

SharePoint Health Checks
#1: End User Health: Happy or
Frustrated? Desktop or Mobile?
#3: System Health: CPU, Memory,
Process Distribution, …
#2: Site Health: Any Errors? Any
Performance Issues?
#4: IIS Health: Bandwidth?
Threads? HTTP 4xx, 5xx?
#5: AppPool Health: Memory,
CPU, GC, Exceptions, Logs …
#6: SQL & Service Health: # Roundtrips,
Data Amount, CPU, Memory, I/O
#7: Web Parts: 3rd Party &
Custom. Bad Coding and Bad
Deployments lead to crashes

Check #1: End User Health
#1: Geo Location: Where from is
SharePoint Accessed? Which
Offices? Which Remote Locations?
#2: User Environment: Is everyone
using IE? How many use Mobile
Devices? Bandwidth Issues?
#3: Errors: Bad URLs? Bad
JavaScript? Missing files?

Check #2: Site Health
#1: Load: Which
sites are used?
#2: Failures: Any
functional issues?
#3: Performance:
Meeting our SLAs?
#4: Infrastructure:
Servers Healthy?
#5: End User Index:
Happy users?

Check #3: System Host Health
#1: CPU & Memory: Background
Jobs Running? What else is
consuming it?
#3: Process Check: Which processes are
consuming these resources? Need to
RE-DEPLOY processes?
#2: I/O: Too much logging?
Serving too many static files?
Data Sync Jobs?

Check #4: IIS Health
#1: Threads: Enough IIS Worker Threads?
Are threads waiting or doing work?
#2: Throughput: Enough Bandwidth
available? Better Cache Settings?
#3: Page Size: Bloated pages?
Cache Settings? CDN?

Check #5: AppPool Health
#1: Memory: Indication of
bad Memory Access or Leaks?
#2: Garbage Collection:
Impact on Performance?
#3: Worker Threads: Proper
Sizing Configuration?

Check #6: SQL & Service Health
#2: Connectivity Issues
#1: Excessive SQL Roundtrips

Check #7: Web Parts
#1: Performance: How long
does it take to render?
#2: Deployment: Missing
any Dependencies?
#3: Bad Coding: 211 SQL
Calls from a single Web Part

3 Steps to Use Dynatrace SharePoint FastPack
#1: Register
bit.ly/dtsharepointfastpack
#2: Install
bit.ly/dttutorials
#3: Analyze
bit.ly/sharepurepath

Key Points to Take Home
#1: End User Health: Happy or
Frustrated? Desktop or Mobile?
#3: System Health: CPU, Memory,
Process Distribution, …
#2: Site Health: Any Errors? Any
Performance Issues?
#4: IIS Health: Bandwidth?
Threads? HTTP 4xx, 5xx?
#5: AppPool Health: Memory,
CPU, GC, Exceptions, Logs …
#6: SQL & Service Health: # Roundtrips,
Data Amount, CPU, Memory, I/O
#7: Web Parts: 3rd Party &
Custom. Bad Coding and Bad
Deployments lead to crashes

Questions and/or Demo
Get Tools: bit.ly/dttrial
YouTube Tutorial: youtu.be/ImivHaDq0OA
Contact Me: agrabner@dynatrace.com
Follow Me: @grabnerandi
Read More: blog.dynatrace.com

Driving SharePoint End-User Adoption: Usability and Performance

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