1. Balancing user experience with
an out-of-the-box design in
SharePoint 2013
Rebecca Jackson
Intranet Specialist
@_rebeccajackson
Melbourne Business User Group (Mbug)
28 February 2014

2. About Melbourne Water
• Victorian Government owned
• 1700 people with intranet access
• Caretaker for
• Water supply catchments
• Removal / treatment of sewage
• Rivers, creeks, major drainage

3. Intranet Redevelopment project
• Current intranet:
• End-of-life of life technology
• Content is out-of-date
• Limited ability to manage
content and improvements
internally
• Lack of innovation
• Difficult to implement
governance

4. Intranet Redevelopment project
• New intranet:
• SharePoint 2013
• Improved user experience
• Fresh look and feel
• New information architecture
• Focusing on core intranet
features
• No collaboration yet
• Limited social

5. Project status
• Current activities:
• In the final phase of development
• Majority of content is written, being reviewed
• Key activities to come:
• User acceptance testing
• Training
• Content migration
• Launch, currently planned for May 2014

6. OOTB vs user experience
A key project objective is around user experience.
We also have a requirement to meet A and AA accessibility guidelines
as per WCAG 2.0.
This is sometimes at odds with our need to stay as close to out-of-the-
box as possible.

7. A quick disclaimer

8. User experience approach
• Completed by a User Experience expert from PWC’s Stamford
• Based on functional requirements and persona needs
• Desk top review
• User interviews
• Three rounds, one after each iteration
• 16 users in total
• Spread across personas, business groups and roles

9. Newsfeed and social features
“I’m thinking maybe it [comments] would go into Yammer.”
SharePoint 2013 includes a number of out-of-the-box social features:
• News feed
• Following people and pages
• #hashtags
• @replies
Usability issues with social features.
• Users assumed the features were Yammer integration.
• Found the follow feature confusing.

10. News feed and social features

11. Comments (Note board)
There is a Note board feature in SharePoint 2013 which we renamed to
‘Comments’ to use on content pages.
Usability issues:
• ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ buttons appear and look clickable, even if there
are no other comments.
• Default message added confusion for users and referred to ‘notes’.
• There was no way for page owners or authors to know if someone
had left a comment.
• People assumed comments were moderated.

12. Comments (Note board)

13. SharePoint terminology
Most users were confused by unfamiliar SharePoint terminology:
• Newsfeed
• SkyDrive
• Sites

14. Search
SharePoint 2013 search is a significant improvement for our users out-
of-the-box.
However…
• Refinement options were completely overlooked by most participants.
• No partial search.
• Both for standard search, and for people search.
• Refinements in the header search were not clear for people.
• The search box and refinements were not clearly formatted.
• Multiple search views confusing.

15. Search

16. Search

17. Organisational chart
People loved that they could see reporting relationships on user
profiles.
But…
• The profile page org chat display is inconsistent.
• There’s a ‘SEE MORE’ link, which most users didn’t notice.
• If they got to the Silverlight view on the next page:
• It was too small.
• The scrolling transition wasn’t easy to use.

18. Organisational chart

19. Organisational chart
• First screenshot shows only direct reports
• Second one shows colleagues
• Not easy to visually differentiate

20. My sites
• User profiles are a separate from the main SharePoint site.
• Makes standardising look and feel problematic.
Usability issues with My Sites
• Not clear for users how to navigate back to the main intranet.
• Contact details layout and spacing poor.
• ‘SEE MORE’ button hiding information.

21. My sites

22. Dot dot dot
Where there are more menu options on functions SharePoint 2013 uses
‘…’ to indicate there is more.
Problem?
• Users don’t see the dots.
• Further functions remain hidden.

23. Dot dot dot

24. Accessibility review
• Completed by an accessibility expert from PWC’s Stamford
• Against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0)
• Desk top review
• Assisted technology review

25. Accessibility findings
A selection of features that did not meet A or AA accessibility
requirements.
• Features not keyboard accessible.
• For example: Formatting toolbar, certain buttons, dropdowns.
• Error messaging not accessible to screen readers.
• Some form fields missing instruction.
• OOTB images with alt text missing or inappropriately used.
• Focus order illogical, and in some cases inappropriately used.

26. Accessibility
Inappropriate use of focus – content preview is functional.

27. Conclusions
• An out-of-the-box intranet is unlikely to meet the usability
requirements of your staff.
• Based on our testing accessibility wasn’t a pass out-of-the-box
• We assessed the importance of the feature against the severity of
the issue.
• Some changes could not be made for this development, but will be
road-mapped for post-launch improvements.
• Build user experience and accessibility into your project and
requirements.
• Test.
• Test early.
• Test throughout the project.

28. Questions?
Feel free to get in touch:
Rebecca Jackson
@_rebeccajackson
rebecca.jackson@melbournewater.com.au
rebeccajacksonblogs.wordpress.com.au