1.
What makes SharePoint UX good?
Presented by Thomas Daly

2.
About Me
• Senior SharePoint Consultant Extraordinaire
• B&R Business Solutions
• Branding & Developer
• Focused on the UI side of things
• Community Involvement
• Speaker
• NJ SharePoint User Group Organizer
• SharePoint Saturday NYC Organizer
• SharePoint Saturday NJ Organizer
• My SharePoint Blog

3.
Overview
• What is UX?
• What defines good UX?
• Evaluation Criteria for SharePoint UX
• Key Tips from the Field
• The Future of SharePoint & Office 365 UX

4.
What is UX?
• UX is the short for User Experience
• UX is the experience that the user has while interacting with your X
• It’s more about how the user feels when they use your X
• Many different parts compose the UX, no “one things” makes it
• UX is NOT the interface or design of your X

5.
UI is not UX
and
UX is not UI

6.
So then what is UI?
• UI is short for User Interface
• It’s what you see in the browser
• Help messages, buttons, modals, characters, style, menus, navigation, pages
• UI is an incredibly important part of UX

7.
What makes
for a good UX?

8.
The User Experience Honeycomb
• Useful. As practitioners, we can’t be content to paint within the lines
drawn by managers. We must have the courage and creativity to ask
whether our products and systems are useful, and to apply our
knowledge of craft + medium to define innovative solutions that are
more useful.
• Usable. Ease of use remains vital, and yet the interface-centered
methods and perspectives of human-computer interaction do not
address all dimensions of web design. In short, usability is necessary
but not sufficient.
• Desirable. Our quest for efficiency must be tempered by an
appreciation for the power and value of image, identity, brand, and
other elements of emotional design.
• Findable. We must strive to design navigable web sites and locatable
objects, so users can find what they need.
• Accessible. Just as our buildings have elevators and ramps, our web
sites should be accessible to people with disabilities (more than 10%
of the population). Today, it’s good business and the ethical thing to
do. Eventually, it will become the law.
• Credible. Thanks to the Web Credibility Project, we’re beginning to
understand the design elements that influence whether users trust
and believe what we tell them.
• Valuable. Our sites must deliver value to our sponsors. For non-profits,
the user experience must advance the mission. With for-profits, it
must contribute to the bottom line and improve customer satisfaction.
PETER MORVILLE
http://semanticstudios.com/user_experience_design/

9.
How can we evaluate SharePoint / O365 UX?
As a Platform
• Enterprise platform in which you can
build upon
• Performs seemingly endless functions
• A Content Management System on
steroids
• At the mercy of Microsoft
• The ability to change whatever you
don’t like or expand upon it.
As your Implementation
• “Your Corporate Intranet”
• What your organization decides to
implement to enhance user productivity
• Providing consistent information to the
workforce
• Increasing productivity through building
components, tools, forms, workflows,
lists, and libraries
We can evaluate SP/O365 in two ways: as a platform & as your implementation

10.
Valuable
• The core of the honey comb – people wouldn’t use it, if there was no
value behind it.
• SharePoint get’s most of it’s UX points from this category
• SharePoint has survived in an industry where things go cold as quickly
as they become hot. This longevity is due to the fact that
organizations are receiving value from this product.
• SharePoint highest value comes from function as a content
management and information delivery system
• SharePoint ability to be customize and integrate with other systems

11.
Usable
• Are your pages laid out clearly and consistently throughout the site?
• Can the user’s get around with in the site and achieve the goals they
need to meet?
• Are the web parts and components functioning as expected?
• Do you have the correct permissions?
• Are all connected services up and running consistently?
• Are you error checking and gracefully handling custom coding errors?

12.
Credible
• SharePoint & O365 have built in credibility passed along from your
organization.
• If your organization is credible, then the perceived credibility of your
Intranet will start around the same level.
• You can only lose credibility by not having information update to date,
by posting information late, or having gaps in content
• Credibility will increase when users believe that they can go to the
intranet and see up-to-date information / content
• Having content authors - owning, maintaining lists/libraries, links

13.
Useful
• Are you building and implementing the right pieces that provide a
direct benefit to the user?
• Are you leveraging enough of the core features that the product has
to offer [Search, Reporting, User Profiles, Social, Yammer?,
Workflows, Skype?, OneDrive?]
• Are you streamlining business processes to increase productivity?
• Are you collecting and monitoring user activity?

14.
Findable
• Are employees able to get what they need in a timely and efficient
manner?
• How well is your navigation structured? Did you spend the upfront time in
planning your information architecture?
• Are you tagging documents & using consistent metadata across your site?
• Are you defining content types?
• Are you using enterprise search? And is it configured and working
properly?
• Make use of managed properties, search synonyms, and search web parts.

15.
Desirable
• Does your site invoke any feeling within the user to want to return?
• Have you overhauled the out of the box interface in a positive way?
• Are you creating apps/web parts within in the recommended patterns
and practices laid out by Microsoft?
• Are you maintain a consistent look and feel or is each component
different?

16.
Accessible
• Can users access your intranet from their work location?
• Are you supporting all of the latest modern browsers or a subset?
• Are you supporting a variety of devices other than desktop/laptop?
Tablets? Phones? BYOD?
• Can users from remote networks accessible the intranet?
• How many hoops does the user have to jump through to make a
connection?
• Can users with visual, hearing, speech, dexterity, and other cognitive
needs utilize your intranet?

17.
How does your SharePoint
measure up?

18.
Tips from the battle field for
developing a better UX

19.
Focus on Purpose
• Too much thought is spent on UI and making things look prettier
• Make sure to spend enough time on the why (do we need this) and
how (will it work)
• The majority of users care about things that work than flashiness
• Reel in your designers – they don’t think about how things work but
only how it looks on the page
• Don’t be sold a flashy image without think about how it will work and
how will you maintain it

20.
Define Content Owners
• Identify who will own sections of your intranet (prior to launching)
• Make sure these people know that they have a new responsibility
• Make sure these people are trained in the ‘how’
• Keep content fresh – specifically if you have an “informational” type
site.
• Stale content means no one cares – or you’re not doing anything
• Users can lose interest quick if your site seem ‘stale’
• When latest documents are released make sure they are first added to your
sites (don’t wait)

21.
Enabling User Interaction
• Enable some of the social features like ratings and comments.
• These can help with search relevancy and improving findability
• Users know they are being monitored and will (typically) self-police
themselves
• Provide mechanism for users to report feedback to the site and/or
content admins
• Community Template – good for FAQs or Site Help [Forum]
• Use Yammer or User Profiles – let users build profiles with pictures

22.
Utilize Search
• Make sure search is operational and crawling your content
periodically
• Test queries and verify that you are getting results periodically
• Use search analytics to see what your users are looking for
• To improve findability use content types and tag with a managed
meta data.
• Lastly make sure you’re sensitive information is secure!!!

23.
Use Development Patterns & Practices
• Check out the Office Dev – Patterns and Practices (PnP)
• http://dev.office.com/patterns-and-practices
• Check out the Office UI Fabric
• http://dev.office.com/fabric
• Try to build client side web parts or apps over traditional C#
• Use REST, JSOM, AJAX, & loaders
• Try, catch and handle your coding errors
• Don’t customize the out of the box display templates, page Layouts or
master pages – make your own!
• Beware of the branding tax – you can pay now or you can pay later

24.
The Future of SharePoint UX

25.
Everything
is Subject
to Change
…and it will

26.
Most Recent Change – Document Library
• Microsoft Document Library

27.
A ton of new features
• UX alignment with OneDrive
• Aligning the user experience so
they don’t need to learn how to
use a library differently
• Responsive – works the same on
a mobile phone
• Modernized meta data entry –
it’s quicker and more seamless
• Resize, Move, & Hide Columns
• Link Sharing
• File Pinning
• Recent Activity Panel
• Right click for context menu
• A new Grid View
• Create Links to other files
• New Image Preview Viewer
• Details pane shows meta data

28.
New Home Page for O365
• Simpler, responsive design
• Immediate access to all your
online applications
• New tool tips help
• Recent applications
• Seamless Office install

29.
What else…
• The user experience will change, it has to in order to compete
• Expect to see responsive improvements
• Expect cleaner, simpler interfaces

30.
UI as a Service
• Subscription based model
• No need to pay for expensive consultants to implement the service,
maintenance, or customize it
• Installs right on top of SharePoint or Office 365
• 100% mobile solutions
• Can help increase user adoption by simplifying the interface

31.
Examples of UIaaS
Collaboration, file-sharing and social made easy, effortless
and mobile
Beezy offers the most comprehensive set of features
delivered in one unique and elegant User Experience

32.
Examples of UIaaS
Boost adoption, mobile, enhanced collaboration

33.
The Future of SharePoint
https://resources.office.com/en-us-landing-the-future-of-
sharepoint.html

34.
• SharePoint Saturday New York
• Free Event, open to public
• All Day Training – 55 speakers from around the globe.
• 7 simultaneous sessions training sessions to choose from
• Business, Management, Cloud, IT Pro, Admin, End User, Development
• Saturday, July 30, 2016 from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM (EDT)
• Microsoft, Times Square
• http://www.spsevents.org/city/NYC/NYC2016

35.
Contact
• Blog - www.thomasdaly.net
• Twitter - @_tomdaly_
• Email
• Personal: tom.m.daly@gmail.com
• Business: tdaly@bandrsolutions.com
• New Jersey SharePoint / Office 365 User Group
• 4th Tuesday of each Month
• 6:30pm – 8:00pm
• Microsoft, Iselin, NJ
• www.njspug.com

36.
Resources
• Search Analytics
• New Analytics in SharePoint 2013
• 5 ways to improve Accessibility
• Accessibility in SharePoint 2013
• What is UX Design? 15 Users Experience Experts Weigh In
• Changes to the SharePoint Document Library
• SharePoint Document Library UI? – article summarizing Yammer IT Pro Network post of
Lincoln DeMaris
• O365 Help - Microsoft Document Library
• New Home Page for Office 365
• Beezy
• SimplySo