Category Archives: Usability

The SharePoint Grade Card

I have now had a much larger exposure to SharePoint’s product offering, and I feel in a much better and knowledgeable place to assess the strength and weaknesses of the technology.  Like any product that attempts to serve a wide range of functionality there are going to be stronger and weaker areas.  One thing the SP team at Microsoft does well is addressing shortfalls in the technology as it matures.

I’ll evaluate each of, what I deem to be, the major functions and tools of SharePoint.  OK, let’s get started.

Windows SharePoint Services — A

Windows SharePoint Services or WSS is now in its third major iteration.  It is the core that MOSS is built upon, and it is where the strength of SharePoint lies.  From it’s incredible Office integration, task and document management, and web part personalization options WSS is what caught my eye and made me desire a career change.There are some minor headaches and pitfalls, but certainly not enough to warrant anything less than an “A” in this category.

Social Networking Capability — B–

Unfortunately, SP didn’t do what I would’ve liked to see in this category.  They introduced “My Sites” in MOSS, but adding colleagues isn’t intuitive and the feature turns into a personal SharePoint site instead of a robust social networking tool for the enterprise.

Blogs and wikis were also introduced in WSS 3, and the inclusion of them is promising but the implementation is poor.  The blog is feature-less allowing only categories and less than impressive personalization features.  The wiki is super basic, and it leaves me confounded on how it seems so quickly implemented.  A look at the benchmark, MediaWiki, will show the lack of robustness in the SP implementation.

Enterprise Search — B+

The MS work on their search in MOSS is surprisingly amazing.  While many companies introduce search replacements for MOSS, often times they are trying to fix poorly architect edsearch solutions with the MS offering.

The search in SP offers many options for optimal information architecture including best bets, search logging/analysis, search scopes, and much more.  It’s impressive to say the least.  The crawler is also very, very effective with filters to spider other forms of content.  They even introduced federated search to this offering, and it makes it all-the-more impressive.

The only reason this doesn’t get an “A” is the search results and placing search in the default interface isn’t worth the high grade although this can be edited by any capable designer.

Business Intelligence — C+

Default business intelligence in SP is less than stellar.  Although key performance indicators (KPI) are in the offering it is simply a graphical display of business data.  Corporations need far more robust diagramming and analysis tools for true business intelligence, and it has been a ripe area for other companies to pick up what is lacking in this feature.

Excel Services is an interesting addition to this as it allows the graphing and analysis of Excel data which is the most rudimentary of business database and business intelligence applications.  I look forward to this being beefed up in the next version of SP.

Web Content Management — B

Web Content Management or WCM was one of my specialties in my last business that shares the name of this site.  I chose WordPress as my tool of choice, but there are fantastic tools including Drupal, Dot Net Nuke, Graffiti CMS, and many others that do a fantastic job with each having their own strengths and weaknesses.

The SP offering of WCM has moved them from solely a intranet/extranet tool into the Internet realm.  WCM is also done differently than or web CMS’.  SP uses metadata in a single list to control what content is available to the page creator in SP Designer.  Creating page layouts then becomes foundational to all SP WCM. Even though pages can be created and metadata is more focused on then other tools such as WordPress or Drupal it still leaves much to be desired.

The workflow of creating metadata to then be used on any form of WCM pages I find quite restricting, and it ultimately slows down the contributor who understands nothing about the WCM architecture.  Inline editing of the content is also less than impressive.  The rich text editor is shaky at best, and the constant need for modal windows hinders usability for the contributor.  To edit the “backend” is only a list without a robust administration interface found in other popular CMS’.

SharePoint Designer and Interface — D

I’m putting both the default interface and SP Designer in the same category since they are so inter-related.  The default interface is clunky, navigation is abundant but poorly implemented, and the “obviousness” of the SP interface is less than obvious.  Also, in the interface the markup is absolutely horrendous.  Typical of ASP.NET controls it outputs horrendous markup.  This hinders accessibility, ease of branding, and even in the realm of SEO when using SP for public-facing sites.  The markup reminds me of what MS is all-to-often ridiculed for lack of web standards awareness.

SP Designer is the approved tool to brand the SP interface.  It’s built on the legacy of FrontPage, and it’s capability and interface is very reminiscent of FrontPage.  However, seemingly they are learning from their rich IDE in Visual Studio and allowed it to influence the designer options and functionality.  If it weren’t for the ability to open up the content database I would never, ever use the tool.  It is expensive, bulky, and there are free editors that make SP Designer look amateur.

The ability to do XSLT in a GUI manner is an interesting perspective, and it makes such a difficult topic somewhat attainable by a non-XML/XSLT expert.  Also, the workflow wizard is actually quite impressive.  Although it has limitations I was able to create a rather complex workflow with logic rather painlessly.

Looking Forward

I’m hoping that these deficiencies will be address and strengths strengthened in the next version of SharePoint.  I understand much of what I criticized is still “version 1.0,” and I expect it to mature.  SharePoint is a powerful platform, and I expect it to continue to dominate the ECM market for years to come.

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A Primer on Information Architecture: Navigation

Navigation and IA

Navigation is without a doubt one of the most essential elements of any interface, and as a result adequate time and thought is necessary to ensure your interface’s navigation is usable and comprehensive.  From the all important global navigation that stays the same throughout the site, to local navigation which changes based on the content of the page, to contextual navigation which exists within the content itself.  They all work together to form a powerful navigation experience.

Types of Navigation

There are typically a few types of navigation: global, local, contextual/supplemental.  Sometimes you may only need one, but other times you may need all three depending on the amount of content and the complexity of the interface.  Understanding how and when to use these different types

  • Global navigation is a navigation structure that stays consistent through your application to provide familiarity and a good overview of your site’s content.
  • Local navigation is a navigation structure contingent on the current content.
  • Contextual navigation refers to navigation that is embedded within a site’s content to facilitate further browsing.  The best of example of this is Wikipedia which links content together inside the articles.

Breadcrumbs

Hansel and Gretel weren’t the only two who wanted to get back to where they started.  Breadcrumbs, when well thought out and implemented in moderation, can add a dynamic and usable element into your interface.

Pagination

Pagination is often an over-looked aspect of effective navigation architectures.  When combined with a thoughtful search architecture it will increase findability drastically.

Navigation Design Patterns

Design patterns are a great way to see how others are starting to standardize the way they approach certain aspects of design and their resulting interactions.  Most often, navigation mistakes are made, because the designer doesn’t take into account existing patterns that users may be familiar with.

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The Most Trivial Aspect of Designing Interfaces

I’ve been doing UI work for almost a decade.  I’ve seen a lot and been through many fads (although I won’t claim them if asked).  For a long time I thought the most important part of designing interfaces was the way it looked, and I was caught up in the next DHTML fad that would come across my RSS reader.  Well, thankfully I’ve grown and realized what’s really important, and I’ve come to realize that an interface’s appearance is not the most important thing.

Note: Please don’t think I’m saying that the way it looks is not as important, but is pales in comparison to our following discussion.

What? You Mean Users Come Here?

When I heard first of User Experience (UX) I had a hard time wrapping my arms around it.  I made it more difficult then it is supposed to be.  In short, UX is the discipline that aims to understand not only who your users are but what they are trying to accomplish with your application.  When you understand UX then you create an interface that facilities these user’s behaviors and desires.   I found this great definition of UX:

The term “user experience” refers to a concept that places the end-user at the focal point of design and development efforts, as opposed to the system, its applications or its aesthetic value alone. It’s based on the general concept of user-centered design. (Source)

I love this definition, because it illustrates that UX “places the end-user at the focal point” which is critical to your applications success.  When you neglect how your users will interact with your system then ultimately, and I guarantee this, it will be a failure. 

We’ve all been on sites that have left a sour taste in our mouth.  Maybe we are forced to use this sites, and when we use them we’d rather complain about them then actually use them.  Whether it’s an intranet or public-facing site we still have the same possibility for failure.  Often times schedules push the necessary time to understand UX to the back-burner in order to “get something out in front of the customer.”  Doesn’t that seem ridiculous?  We want to get something out for our customers so they can benefit from it, but we don’t do the careful assessment necessary to ensure that this happens?

Practical Steps to Facilitate UX Research

Here is a short list of items to remember when developing your next application to conjure UX research.

  1. Spend some meaningful time interviewing a wide-range of potential consumers to uncover what they would use your application for.
  2. If you’re replacing a legacy system then be sure to ask what about the current system frustrates them.
  3. Let your feedback from the consumers drive those tense decisions that often play out between the development team and management.
  4. Diagram workflow to understand all variations your users can get from your application.
  5. Usability testing will become invaluable to see how users actually use your system as opposed to a hypothetical discussion.
  6. Engage user feedback and understanding when developing your information architecture (labels, navigation, etc).

We are all users, and we all have strong opinions on how interfaces should look and function.  The only problem is when we start designing applications that cater to our personal or internal desires and not what aides our customer.  UX doesn’t have to be a burdensome process that puts your project behind schedule, and if done correctly you’ll see immediate and lasting positive effects from your effort.

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