I remember playing with the beta, and after about 10 minutes I completely gave up.  It was obvious that Microsoft was trying to tow the line between a touch and desktop UI, and it ultimately ending up satisfying neither audience or need.  This video was shared on Twitter, and it summarizes my sentiments perfectly on Windows 8.  Even though the video is a bit long (about 24 minutes), I highly suggest watching until the end.

Jakob Nielsen also posted his usability findings on Windows 8, and it is worth the read.  With both the article and video you can get a sense of what went so wrong with this OS.  Was this the reason Steven Sinofsky was fired?  I would’ve imagined that Ballmer signed off on this mess.

There is also news that Microsoft is taking another page out of Apple’s book and moving to a yearly release cycle with their desktop operating systems.  Whatever they might be doing, I hope that they manage to fix Windows 8.  Everyone was in an uproar over Windows Vista back in the day, but I always thought those criticisms were overblown.  But this time all criticism about Windows 8 is warranted.

This post contrasts the design philosophies and approaches that underpin both Apple and Microsoft.  It is meant to be a conversation starter and not a way to flame either side.  If it weren’t for SharePoint, I couldn’t afford all my (admittely) over-priced Apple products.  Let’s now consider the question of what SharePoint might look like if Apple designed the product.

Native Apps Emphasis Over Web Apps

I think the most striking difference we would see is a fundamental shift away from the browser for SharePoint.  SharePoint at it’s core is a platform wrapped in a web application.  To work with SharePoint, by and large, means working in a browser.  Now of course the Office products and SharePoint Workspace do interact with SharePoint as desktop products, but the primary intent of SharePoint is to function within a web UI.

Apple on the other hand creates internet services only to enhance native apps. iCloud is a great example to illustrate this philosophy. While iCloud has a minimal web UI, it is not advertised extensively and wasn’t even mentioned (from what I can remember) when Jobs unveiled it. The emphasis at the unveiling was all about how the service would enhance native applications on iOS: Photo Stream synced your photos between devices, and “documents in the cloud” was a way to enhance native the iWork applications on iOS.

Consumers First, Power Users Second

I think the thing that frustrates most “power users” or “tinkerers” with Apple’s products is that it feels dumbed down.  There are settings, but it is nowhere near the expectation of a user familiar with lots of perceived flexibility. Apple presents their products for someone to get started right away with little issue. You hear stories of how grandma or a two-year-old could work an iPad, which is suppose to extol the usability of Apple products, but I’ve never heard that about a Microsoft product.

Microsoft, by and large from my perception, has power users in mind and scale back for more casual users.  If you’ve worked with the control panel in Windows as well as the settings in OS X, you see an immediate contrast.  SharePoint is no different.   Working with the settings for the library in the ribbon or settings page immediately clue in to the complexity of the product.  I’ve been working with SharePoint for several years, and I still don’t feel like I understand every setting just in a document library!

One of my favorite UX principles is the delicate balance between usability and functionality. Ideally, they meet in the middle and provide a good balance. Apple favors simplicity over extensive amounts of functionality, and Microsoft does the opposite. In truth, they both use with a little more balanced position, but I’m not here to criticize either in this post.

A Very Different Third-Party Ecosystem

I think another big area of difference is how the third-party ecosystems are handled. Apple is notorious for a rigorous review process which they want to handle both in the mobile and desktop space. Microsoft on the other hand recognizes third-party vendors (and sometimes buy them) but doesn’t distribute applications themselves.  Right now, Microsoft leaves the vetting of these products to the individual organization.  If I were a betting man, I’d venture to say this will in some way change in “SharePoint 15″ largely in part to the success of companies like Apple.

The SharePoint ecosystem is massive, and it makes for an extremely attractive feature to an already massive product.  However, the quality of these products also varies considerably.  I’ve seen products that are absolutely amazing and others that should never have been sold publicly.  Unlike Apple, Microsoft doesn’t publish any HCI guidelines, and this has a huge impact. I often said, “This app doesn’t feel like a Mac/iOS app,” but I’ve never said, “This SharePoint add-on doesn’t feel like a SharePoint tool.”

Marketing People Not Technology

As I’ve watched Apple over the last few years, I’ve realized how much certain marketing tactics can actually shape the way you feel emotionally about a product. They are well known for their marketing prowess and for good reason.  Almost every Apple ad or other marketing endeavor focuses on the result of technology, which ultimately highlights people, and not the product itself.  Ads for the iPhone 4 showed a dad on a business trip doing a Facetime call with his newborn child, and recent iPad apps show kids learning math on the device.

In contrast, Microsoft ads by and large talk about the technology itself and not a means to an end.  This isn’t always true, and I think Microsoft and other companies are shifting away from it due to the influence of companies like Apple; but it is still very prevelant. Microsoft has had some odd marketing choices recently from using Jerry Seinfeld to their absolutely worthless Office “vision” videos.  Anything on SharePoint from Microsoft has always focused on the technology. Granted, SharePoint and an iPad have different markets, but I would much rather see an engaging ad on SharePoint that talked about how people were improved not some sterile business process.

A Unified Approach to a Family of Products

The last thing I’d like to mention is how I think Apple would handle differently the creation of a “family” of server products. By this I mean SharePoint, Lync, Exchange, O365.  If there is one thing Microsoft understand much better than Apple is integration. I am sometimes amazed at how Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint can work together; but when you work with each one of the products it is apparent that individual teams with individual leaders are designing their own experiences with the product (i.e. Why don’t Lync and Exchange online use a ribbon?). I feel like I’m postulating here quite a bit, but I feel like if Apple approached the experience design between all these products it would be more similiar.

I don’t think the lack of end-user experience is only between these server products. There are times in SharePoint that I wonder how the experience can be so different even inside the product (I even started a blog pointing all these things out).  Apple is fortunate that they had a Jobs who could almost singlehandedly touch every part of the company, but I feel like Microsoft could gain from a single person designing and coordinating the experiences across all of their server products. I sometimes feel like Microsoft creates by outlining features (instead of designing an overarching UX) and then creating the product by diving out tasks to disparate developers (which is how most consultants work).

Conclusion

SharePoint is a great product with a lot of potential, and it’s quite apparent that there’s nothing but limitless excitement right now for the product. I think Microsoft is getting the clue from the success of other companies like Apple and are changing their approach drastically, and that should excite anyone involved with the Microsoft family of products.

Case in point, here is an event page layout for the new Portal Solutions site built in 2010 (the methods described in this post will work in 2007, but all sample code is tested in 2010). As you can see, I have a section that highlights details about the event, and this section is a smaller, floated column on the right. Dragging the columns from the toolbox into the page layout produces a rather ugly content management experience.

A Rather Ugly Experience

The forms that are added inline throw off the layout. You can also notice that I also have a styled button, and putting this page into edit mode actually makes that metadata column incomprehensible. Clearly, we need a better solution.

Using the Read-Only Metadata Value Control

Thankfully the platform provides us some tags that allow us to change how this works. Instead of using a single control that does both the edit mode and display mode we can split the two. Here is what the code looks like when I simply drag and drop the column from the toolbox (this is the address column which actually OTB).

<SharePointWebControls:NoteField FieldName="fc2e189e-ba91-48c9-9dd3-16531afddd50"
   runat="server"></SharePointWebControls:NoteField>

What this control does is in display mode it only pulls the value of the column, but in edit mode it adds the form to support editing the value. We need the ability to separate the two display modes to make for a better experience, and I will show you how.

But first let me direct your attention to that nasty GUID in the snippet above. That comes from SharePoint Designer 2010 by default, and what we really want to use there in the FieldName attribute is not the GUID but the internal name for the column (in SP Designer 2007 it correctly pulls the internal name). While this code might work for a one-off, it certainly won’t work in a scenario where we need to publish these page layouts particularly in a feature deployment. If you didn’t create the column with a feature you can find the internal name by simply opening up the column in edit mode inside the UI (Site Settings » Site Columns » Your Column Name), and in the title bar it will tell you the internal name after the ?field= in the URL (be sure if you create the name in the UI to keep the column name all one word when first creating, and then you can go back and add spaces).

The Column’s Internal Name

Now let’s look at a special control that only pulls the value from a column, and even when it’s in edit mode it doesn’t show a form. This truly is a column in read-only mode. This snippet uses the same address column.

<SharePointWebControls:FieldValue id="WorkAddress" FieldName="WorkAddress"
   runat="server"></SharePointWebControls:FieldValue>

This is much better! Technically, the ID can be whatever you want, but be sure to coordinate to with a developer if they are working with this in any way and need to know the ID. I usually keep the ID and the FieldName the same, but that is at your discretion. Now let’s replace all the columns with this read-only control and see what this looks like in edit mode.

A Much Better Appearance

Adding Back in the Editing Experience

This is looking good, but we still want the ability to edit the values for these columns inline. To do this I add a section at the bottom of the page dedicated to editing metadata. I still keep the rich HTML fields (Publishing Page Content) in the page where they display (if I’m using it), but I move all other columns down below (and sometimes depending on the situation I even put publishing HTML fields in this metadata zone as well). To accomplish this we are going to use the EditModePanel control from the same toolbox panel (in the SharePoint Controls » Server Controls section) to add content into the page that only displays when the page is in edit mode.

<PublishingWebControls:EditModePanel runat="server" id="PageMetadata">

<div class="pagemetadata">

<h4>Edit Page Metadata</h4>

<SharePointWebControls:TextField FieldName="Title" runat="server"></SharePointWebControls:TextField>
<SharePointWebControls:DateTimeField FieldName="EventStartDate" runat="server"></SharePointWebControls:DateTimeField>
<SharePointWebControls:DateTimeField FieldName="EventEndDate" runat="server"></SharePointWebControls:DateTimeField>
<Taxonomy:TaxonomyFieldControl FieldName="EventType" runat="server"></Taxonomy:TaxonomyFieldControl>
<SharePointWebControls:UrlField FieldName="RegisterLink" runat="server"></SharePointWebControls:UrlField>
<SharePointWebControls:NoteField FieldName="WorkAddress" runat="server"></SharePointWebControls:NoteField>
<link href="/_layouts/1033/styles/Themable/forms.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

</div>

</PublishingWebControls:EditModePanel>

This will allow the content contributor to have a much more streamlined experience particularly in pages where you have a significant amount of metadata you want to offer to edit inline. The column controls I’m using above are similar to the ones provided by the toolbox (with the GUIDs replaced with internal names), but with the EditModePanel it only shows the form layout to edit when the user asks for it in a much better layout.

The one thing to notice is the inclusion of a SharePoint stylesheet that styles the HTML from the controls added when the page is in edit mode. I noticed sometimes the stylesheet didn’t come through, so to alleviate I just included it. It only renders when in edit mode so it’s not an unnecessary HTTP request for viewing content only, and even if it is already included it shouldn’t cause you a styling issue unless you want to overwrite these form styles (in that case remove that reference above).

Here is what the edit metadata zone looks like in edit mode which I put under the page content. I didn’t do much with it style-wise in this screenshot, but you could add some nice touches depending on your desires or needs.

The Dedicated Metadata Editing Area

Presentation

I made a video that was my actual presentation including going over all of the slides and analysis on the usability test. The presentation runs slightly over 50 minutes. You can also download the slides from the talk as well.

Usability Test

If you want to watch and think through the usability test in its entirety without my commentary you can view it through the UserTesting.com site.

View Usability Test

Resources Mentioned in Presentation

Here are links to the various sites and applications I mention in the slides.

• Morae
• Sliverback
• UserTesting.com
• Open Hallway
• Optimal Workshop

SharePoint is an amazing tool that has almost endless possibilities, but it has some rough edges. Ask any SharePoint consultant, and they can easily go on at length about things in SharePoint that baffle them. This blog is about those baffling moments. The difference between good applications and great applications are details, and SharePoint is such a massive application (really it’s a platform which has a default interface and features) that many details get lost or are forgotten. This blog is about the interactions, information architectures, usability issues, and other experience decisions that I and the community find problematic with the application.

I will be accepting entries to the blog, and all that is outlined on the page linked above. Please let me know your thoughts, and if you are so inclined you can subscribe.

Unexpected Error (error.siolon.com)

Recent Articles

I recently did two articles for other SharePoint blogs. The first was for the Microsoft end-user blog Get the Point. I was contacted by them a couple of years ago, and I wrote some articles but lost touch with them. I decided to get back to contributing. I am really proud of the article, and I think it is an exhaustive look at the out-of-the-box functionality provided by the enterprise keywords column.

Demystifying the Enterprise Keywords Column

The second article was actually a sizable project I worked on with MVP Michal Pisarek, and it is posted on Nothing But SharePoint. The thrust of the article is to expose others to the analysis process necessary to craft successful SharePoint solutions. For the article we focused on search, but it is certainly a process that can apply to other areas of SharePoint implementations.

By far the best part of the entire process was getting to know Michal better and working with him. If you haven’t read his work, or interacted with him I suggest you do. It’s refreshing to work with someone with such a similar outlook on the technology and consulting.

Let’s Make Search Not Suck

I will be presenting with newly crowned MVP Dave Coleman. My part of the presentations will the overview and conceptual, and then Dave will show how that is implemented using MetaVis. Below are details on both webinars.

“Moving From the Faithful File Share to SharePoint”

April 20, 2011, 2–3 PM (EST)

In this session we will look at a fictional migration scenario from a file share into SharePoint 2010. The focus of this will be a sample information architecture design process guided by company requirements. Through the combination of informed design decisions and thoughtful business analysis you can ensure the success of your SharePoint investment.

View On Demand

“Don’t Upgrade Your Mess”

May 11, 2011, 2–3 PM (EST)

In this session we will look at sample migration from SharePoint Server 2007 to Server 2010. Included in the session will be items of consideration when upgrading your SharePoint environment including concerns such as the information architecture, information classification and security. Upgrades provide a great opportunity to optimize your SharePoint investment, and this session we will show you how.

View on Demand

You can also download the files I used in the presentation.

• PowerPoint and Mindmap from the video
• Sample taxonomy mindmap mentioned in video

The Mythical End User (Who Really Is You)

We all know (at least I hope we all know) that designing by committee is a shortcut to failed design (this video nails the comedy behind it). One of the first mistakes made in design meetings and teams is that our own personal preferences and desires get projected onto a mythical end-user. How often have you heard something like this.

• “Our users don’t like drop downs.”
• “I don’t think our users will want to see green there.”
• “You know, I’m not sure end users will like that.”

When we probe more we find out that these end-user projections are just personal preferences. The problem of going into a client and suggestion you’re focused on “the end-user” will almost instantly and unconsciously turn our design discussions into projections of this mythical end-user. The well versed usability expert Steve Krug puts it in perspective.

“And the worst thing about the myth of the Average User is that it reinforces the idea that good Web design is largely a matter of figuring out what people like. […] The problem is that there are no simple ‘right’ answers for most Web design questions (at least not for the important ones). What works is good, integrated design that fills a need—carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.“
Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (pg. 128)

The Misuse of End User Research

It’s not without debate that understanding what types of users that will use your application is of value. If your application has a very specific focus and niche group it makes a lot of design decisions a lot easier. However, often times a mistake made is when we start placing all types of value on suggestions and feedback we receive from users.

Don’t jump ahead on me. I’m not stating that users don’t have valuable input at many stages of the design and maintenance process. If I believed that I would also tell you that usability testing is the largest waste of time in a project which I clearly do not. But I believe that decisions made by an informed UX researcher are often negated, because end users make proclamations about how they feel an application should behave. This ultimately makes your application less worthwhile to larger groups of people. Don Norman states the following.

“Sometimes what is needed is a design dictator who says, ‘Ignore what users say: I know what’s best for them. […] The ‘listen to your users’ produces incoherent designs. The ‘ignore your users’ can produce horror stories, unless the person in charge has a clear vision for the product, what I have called the ‘Conceptual Model.’ The person in charge must follow that vision and not be afraid to ignore findings. Yes, listen to customers, but don’t always do what they say.”

When designing an application a user’s opinion should be stated and noted but not used as the barometer for our design activities. Let’s face it, if we’ve done any work designing application the one thing that that will show up time and time again is that end users don’t know what they want. It’s not their fault either they are simply caught in the middle. Successful applications help users through accomplishing what they need to do without an unfair focus on what they think they want to do.

The Better Emphasis: Designing for Activities

In the article mentioned above by Don Norman he goes on to explain more of why designing for activities is better than user-centered (he uses “human-centered” terminology). All applications exist for a reason, and that reason is to help someone accomplish a task or achieve a goal. It doesn’t matter whether the activity is buying clothes, researching movie times or playing games online. If designers were more honest with themselves and spent less time laboring in Photoshop they’d realize that better time is spent thinking about design in terms of what goals and activities need to be accomplished by your users.

It is this focus that really helped me see a new light in designing user experiences. When I was liberated to think more about designing applications that accomplished goals and less about whether they application used Verdana or Arial I became much more effective. All of the sudden the applications I worked on delivered more utility and saw users returning more often. It is the reason I implore designers everywhere to not use “user-centered design” but instead turn your clients attention to “activity/goal-centered design.”

Conclusion

The astute reader will notice nothing I’ve said here goes against the classically defined tenants of user-centered design, but I wanted to illustrate why using that language with less educated clients doesn’t ultimately help you in your design activities. Be intentional and careful with the words you use, and I guarantee you will find more success in your projects.

Mindjet MindManager has since become my tool of choice for creating and document SharePoint information architectures/taxonomies. I have created a template for SharePoint that you can also use in your next project to get started. While it has some specific columns and has a term store section it can also be used for MOSS/WSS 3 taxonomies as well with a little editing.

The template includes the following features.

• Content type nodes and hierarchy illustrated. The content type nodes also include properties such as internal name, public name, template, etc.
• Every out-of-the-box column has a template node with the available custom properties to define. Also included are visual column groups.
• Site structure illustration. Included are color-codes notes with properties for sites.
• Term store groups. Term store groups, sets and terms are illustrated hierarchically.
• Property mappings for user profile. Since SharePoint 2010 utilizes user profile properties in the term store an example node is included with the custom properties definable for a property import.
• A visual icon designation for many of the nodes as well as a legend is also provided.

Here are a few images to illustrate what it looks like.

Content Types

Content Types Section

Term Store

Term Store Section

Site Structure

Site Structure Section

Here is a video giving an overview of the mindmap (although it’s a little out of date now).

Download the template

Note on Compatibility: While this will open in the Mac version some fidelity is lost. Mindjet hasn’t quite gotten down the compatibility between the two versions. This was created in version 8 for Windows but opens and works fine in version 9 (not tested in lower versions).

There are two wireframes: one is for a team site template, and the other is for My Sites. I did not create a publishing site one, because if you’re doing wireframe activities for a publishing site most likely you’re starting over on your interface. You can however use parts from the team site one when building it if you wish. The SharePoint Foundation and Server 2010 team sites are the same so you can use the same wireframe.

They are provided in a Visio format and PDF. I have created them in Visio 2010 and assume they will work in older versions of Visio; please let me know if they do not. I also once again made use of the (updated) GUUUI Visio stencil kit.

• SharePoint 2010 Team Site Wireframe (Visio)
• SharePoint 2010 Team Site Wireframe (PDF)
• SharePoint 2010 My Site Wireframe (Visio)
• SharePoint 2010 My Site Wireframe (PDF)

UPDATE: A commenter below has linked to some Balsamiq templates if you use that application.