Crafting an interface for an electronic
medium like the web browser is no easy task. The canvas of the web appears in
so many mediums, on so many devices and in so many forms that visualizing the
outcome of your work is a tall order, to say the least. Now, consider doing
this for a platform like SharePoint. Microsoft offers a plethora of templates
and functionality within the confines of its flagship platform. We have blogs,
wikis, sites, pages, calendars, lists, libraries, and web parts, oh my. There are also limitations in
SharePoint. There are things that are easy and infinitely flexible. There are
things that are surprisingly rigid and difficult to customize. Recognizing the
difference between the easy, the hard, the possible, and the impossible can be
challenging. Quickly, the creative process becomes a minefield of things you
can, can’t, should, or shouldn’t do. This is a challenge that everyone faces
when introducing themselves to this platform. It is something that we overcome,
that we learn over time. We teach ourselves to overcome some obstacles, and to
avoid others. We learn the intricacies of SharePoint; we hit roadblocks,
discover caveats, and we explore new features that unlock new abilities.
Most of us in the creative industry are
accustomed to freedom. We work with simple platforms that allow us to do pretty
much anything we can imagine. We design and implement without limitation. We
have complete control. SharePoint, however, is a different beast entirely. It’s
a powerful platform that does many things (perhaps too many). This is not a
blog, this is not a website, it’s anything and everything we want it to be.
It’s both empowering and infuriating all at once. The power of SharePoint
forces us to relinquish control to some extent. We must allow SharePoint to be
SharePoint.
While immensely popular in the enterprise
world, SharePoint is not entirely known to the masses of the creative industry.
You may work with creative designers in your own organization, or perhaps you
hire out your creative work to freelance designers and creative agencies.
Either way, the people you work with are not necessarily versed in the
intricacies that make up the SharePoint interface. This provides a huge
challenge for everyone involved. Your creative designers may be accustomed to
the level of control they find in simpler blog platforms. They may make
creative suggestions for elements that would appear in your SharePoint
interface. The most common things that I see from designers are newsletters,
videos, or sign-in forms. While it is a great and creative idea, something as simple
as a sign-in form can range anywhere from easy to impossible depending on the
nature of your SharePoint environment.
Finding Balance
Applying creative design to SharePoint is
an effort of balance. The best creative work makes full use of the empowering
features of the platform, while also providing deviation from the norm to
achieve a greater sense of unique identity. We want to “make SharePoint not
look like SharePoint,” but at the same time retain the advantages that led us
to choose the platform in the first place. Finding this balance can be a
challenge. Several characteristics of your SharePoint customization project
will determine the balance of your creative design.
● Defining scope
Identifying the scope of your project is one of the easiest and most important
ways to help create balance in your SharePoint creative design work. Do you
have a day to complete the design, or do you have a year? This question seems
obvious, but simply addressing the timeline and resource limit of your project
will help to shape vision of what it is that you want to build. Smaller
projects will likely resemble the SharePoint product, as it appears “out of the
box.” Larger projects with more time and more resources grant added
flexibility. In these projects, you can start to challenge the SharePoint norm,
and build greater customization into the platform.
● Discovering new ideas
Never assume that you know all the answers. Performing a formal discovery phase
in your project helps solidify and refine your vision of the end result, and
often unearths new ideas or new requirements that you would have otherwise
overlooked. Questions like “Why are we doing this?” may sound silly at first,
but the discussion that follows is a valuable insight into the design
initiative.
● Connecting with your audience
Talk to everyone. Connect with real users of the interface you’re building. Use
surveys, interviews, focus groups, and every user research tool at your
disposal in order to create an all-encompassing vision of the project outcome.
Talk to stakeholders who have been in the organization for decades, and
understand how their unique perspective can shape the interface that you will
build. Balance their views with those of new users who are seeing the website
interface for the first time. Everyone’s input is valuable, not just the CEO
who’s paying the bill. Analyze and interpret the feedback that you receive.
Gather quantitative data like “75% of our users are unsatisfied with the search
feature in our website.” Balance quantitative data with qualitative feedback
like “Quincy thinks finding research articles takes too long.” Build a balanced
perspective of your audience, and use that to shape everything that you build.
● Avoiding popular assumption
The enemy of balance is assumption. People often come to me with assumptions
like “we want a tiled interface because it’s popular.” This feedback is
important, to be sure, but should be taken with a grain of salt. Assumptions
made at the beginning of a project are useful to identify the inspiration of
your design work, but they should never be treated as direction. Inspiration
and direction are two very different things that are often treated as one and
the same. Good design is directed. Great design is inspired.
Crafting a Vision
With a balanced perspective of the
project-to-be in hand, the time comes to craft a vision of the final product
that the project team will work so diligently to build. It’s time now for the
information architect to analyze and summarize the information gathered during
project discovery. This essential step in the creative process polishes your
(sometimes divergent) user research into a coherent and singular message.
● Personifying your audience
User personas help humanize and simplify your audience. These
documents are simple personifications
of your real users. They help define the behavior, characteristics, desires,
and frustrations of the people you have researched. The format of these
documents is not important. They can be built using word processors, drawing
tools, or even sketched on paper.
● Mapping your content
Site maps help define navigation systems that will appear in your creative design.
These documents are simple diagrams that show content connections, and methods
of moving from one piece of web content to the next. SharePoint, as a product,
provides two main navigation systems known as the global navigation menu (often
seen as a horizontal menu near the top of each page), and the current
navigation menu (often a vertical menu on the left- or right-hand side of each
page). Depending on the scope of your project, you may choose to augment or
even remove these navigation systems to suit your design.
● Defining creative aesthetic
The creative aesthetic of a design defines the tone, the message, and the
emotional context of an entire website interface. Some designs are fun and
casual, while others may be stolid and professional. What is the tone of your
design? The tone of a design should match the personality of its users. Define
a creative aesthetic using color (warm vs. cool, contrasting vs. complimentary,
etc.), texture, imagery, and typography. Providing detailed information about
aesthetic to your graphic designers helps create inspiration. Avoid creating
acronym-driven designs, using words like clean,
professional, or modern.
Granting Reality
With a polished vision of the creative
design in mind, the time comes to provide this vision to a graphic designer,
who in turn uses your documents as inspiration to build fully detailed design
compositions. You can add even more detail to this process using content
wireframes, style tiles, or even detailed interactive prototypes of your SharePoint
website. Allow ample time in the creative process for modifications and
revisions. Working with graphic designers who have never worked on the
SharePoint platform can be difficult. It often takes some time before designers
become intimately familiar with the dos and don’ts of the Microsoft world.
Review each design revision with a technical eye, identifying common elements
that graphic designers add to their work that could potentially alter the scope
of your project.
● Forms
Simple forms like sign-in and
newsletter sign-up forms are a great addition to any site but they are not so
easy to create in SharePoint. Unless you have a specific solution, product, or
authentication method in mind, stick with what you see in the out-of-the-box
interface.
● Video
Multimedia and video are a great way to present content to your users. With
video, however, ensure that you’ve properly planned for the implementation of
video within your SharePoint environment. Ask appropriate questions like:
○ Who is producing the video? Do we have staff and
bandwidth to produce quality video content on a regular basis?
○ Where will the video be hosted? Do we have
network bandwidth to stream video from our SharePoint environment?
○ What format is the video produced in? Is this
format compatible with our supported web browsers?
○ Do we need to support video on mobile devices
like tablets and smartphones?
● Dates and times
Even something as minuscule as a date format can be troublesome to overcome in
the SharePoint world. By default, many date and time fields in SharePoint
display in a proprietary format controlled by the regional settings of your
environment. Depending on where and how date information is displayed, you may
or may not have control over the specific formats.
● Pagination, read more, continue reading, more
results…
Buttons and links that contain text like
“continue reading” or “read more” are great additions to any design, but in
many cases default SharePoint content does not support pagination or content
excerpts. These things can be built, to be sure, the scope of your project
may not accommodate the additional effort needed to reflect what is shown in
your design.
With a real design in hand, all that remains is to execute the design
within the SharePoint platform. I find that most designers (myself included)
itch to jump into implementation at the onset of the project. We want to
immediately start designing, building, coding, and solving problems. That’s
simply our nature. With proper constraint, however, I find that the outcome of
most projects are greatly improved as a result of this formal design process.
Moreover, this process is platform
agnostic. It’s something you could as easily apply to WordPress as you could to
SharePoint, and that’s a good thing. Applying design to SharePoint is really
just a subset of the overall web design discipline. User experience doesn’t
dictate the platform it’s experienced upon, and neither should you. Create
something unique and polished, and your users will respond with their
appreciation and increased adoption of the product.