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Have you ever wanted to create a new and different User Experience on top of a tried and true delivery platform?

That is just what a new book published by Apress and written by my EMC Colleague Erik Swenson teaches people how to do.  I recently had the pleasure of previewing a copy and participating in editing those chapters that pertained to my area of expertise 'Information Architecture.'  For years I have been meeting with Intranet design customers who often say the same thing about their User Story with regard to utilizing the web channel as a more Usable Internal Communications vehicle: "I want to use SharePoint for my Corporate Intranet because of it's familiar office-like functionality and easy to maintain User administration and configuration interfaces, 'but I don't want my website it to 'look like SharePoint does by default right 'Out of The Box'."

Erik's new Book "Practical SharePoint 2010 Branding and customization" helps web designers and their clients meet those needs in a unique and rewarding way that I've not seen other books do (or even attempt to do) in the past.  It puts practical 'hand-on' advice in layman's terms and makes UI Design techniques more accessible to a broader audience.  I can't remember how many times I have heard experienced UI Designers and Front-end developers (as well as other stakeholders who are relatively new to the game) say that "I wish this book I just read had more 'how to' instructions in it, I wish I could find another web design book that reads more like a 'Do It Yourself'' guide." or  "All this design philosophy and UI process methodology direction is great, but how do I take action on it?"

If these concepts and those customer re-design requests resonates a chord within you, either as an aspiring web designer or as a project-dedicated Subject Matter Expert (or even as any other Software design team stakeholder), then this new book will definitely be an eye-opener for you that adds value to your journey through an otherwise challenging process.

In this book Erik provides an 'Intro to SharePoint 2010 Branding,' an 'Overview of the User Experience \ Branding process', an easy to understand guide on how to 'Gather Branding Requirements,' concrete examples on 'Creating the Visual Design,' and practical hands-on guidance on 'Development Environment Setup.'  It goes on to offer deeper specifics on 'Building the Design,' Testing the Visual Build.' constructive 'Tips and Tricks.' as well as providing a couple of chapters on Tools, Resources, and CSS Reference material.

I highly recommend this book as a good read for anyone who finds themselves involved in a large-scale web design effort.

As an Instructional Design education manual for 2010 web design, It is truly a brilliant piece.

find it on Amazon at:

 http://www.amazon.com/Practical-SharePoint-2010-Branding-Customization/dp/1430240261/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325877291&sr=1-1

I am sure that you will find it to be an excellent companion throughout your journey towards 'User-Friendly and Intuitive User Interface Design'

thanks,

Robert Dornbush

Information Architect and Interaction Designer at EMC Consulting

As an enthusiast of Software Development, I imagine that You have already been exposed to the term 'Personas' before in the context of a User Centered Design discussion.  In this article I intend to explain what 'User Journeys' are, how to create them, and why they are more appropriate for use in an enterprise Corporate Intranet design context than Personas are.

Before I can do that; however, I must explain briefly what personas are and what they're used for in the domain of Internet based software and web design.  A persona is like a realistic profile of fictitious individual used to define a certain target audience segment.  In public-facing web sites used for establishing brand identity, product placement and the user experience of on-line retail sales, Personas are very helpful in defining several target audiences for the purpose of insuring that we (the development team) are not streamlining for one target audience at the expense of another.  The concept is that there are multiple User Types and each should be considered with equal reverence during the course of your design efforts. One man's pain point may be another man's UI shortcut or treasure, Let me illustrate by way of example...

I once worked for a retail auto sales web site where (yes, you are taking advice from a used car salesman here) we had developed four personas to help them define the sometimes transient user types and identify more correctly with the UX desires of each individual target audience segment.  The names have been changed to protect the innocent, but basically We had an 'Expert Edward,' 'Particular Paula,' 'Frugal Frank,' and 'Trade-off Tamara.'  Each one a full-blown personality profile describing them to a 'T' right down to their imaginary photograph, personality collage, and undergarment preferences.  Ed was the type who would read-up on the facts and stats of every auto make and model before making a decision as to which one to buy, Paula was the type who wants a BMW because all of her friends drive a BMW, Frank was the type for whom saving money is paramount - and he just wants a vehicle to "get him from point 'a' to point 'b' " - with no regard for what brand or how fancy it is, and Tamara was the kind of customer who wants a Cadillac but can only afford a Camry, so she would be thrilled to settle for something a little more than she can afford but less that she expected.

Wow!, that's starting to get personal, isn't it?  It's a whole lot of information intended to help us understand more about people who may potentially buy our products.  But let's say were not selling any products.  Let's say we're trying to organize data on a huge Intranet with a difficult to use interface and a pretty much captive audience. They have to use it because they work there, and they often have a difficult time trying to find the data that they're looking for in this gigantic mess of unplanned and often viral growth we call the Intranet.  Something like Personas might help us identify with the needs of this target audience as well, but are 'Personas' the right fit? - Not So Much (TMI? perhaps) Instead of full-blown personality profiles and fictitious Franks, our Corporate Intranet design could benefit a lot more from an exercise commonly known as 'User Journey Optimization.'

To create effective 'User Journeys,' We must first identify several roles, user classes, or 'User Types' that must use this system to perform their routine tasks on a regular basis.  Next we must write a brief 'back-story' for each User Type, not un-similar to the User Stories made so popular on the scrum field of Agile Development.  These are purely fictitious like the 'Personas' used in public web site design; however, they are written with the intent of testing a business case (or several) around a specific type of User's daily Journey through our software. We do this to poke holes in, and / or validate, the project team's preconceived notions* may have about what the Users want and expect out of the software we are building.

(*=our team-mates and development stakeholders' baggage they bring into the project assuming 'this is how it should be') 

Rather than the Carol, Ted, Bob, & Alice of Persona-land, we are looking for the corp. intranet User types like 'Sam, a project manager, needs to post an update to the project schedule,' 'Dianne, a Departmental Business Lead, needs to go into the 'Project Central' team site and generate a report to show her boss on the status of the TPS projected vs. actuals,' and 'Rob, a Site Owner/Admin needs to add some photos and text to the internal news articles on his department's Home page.'

 We still go with names and a wee bit of fictitious storyline to help make the characters seem more real to the team, but the intent here is much more down to earth.  I am not beating the drum of splendid ad copy to loudly proclaim 'I am so great,' - Instead I am hoping to instill each member of my development team with a bit of quietly inspired brilliance that will carry them through a strenuous 'imagineering' process.  We will ask questions like "Who are the Users," What is the Content," and "How will they access that content on a daily basis?"  We will draw diagrams illustrating pods within the Corporation's universe of data in a big circle know as the 'environment' - we will draw leaves and nodes, draw stick figures around the circle representing each User Type, and map them to the data they typically need to access on a daily basis - and in doing do -as a pleasant but nearly 'free' by-product - we will begin to define that all-important 'User Task Analysis' which is often so hard to get started on or quantify.

Why do we do all this?  It's because Better Usability can only be achieved by carefully addressing  the qualitative User Experience, and because flaws in that experience can only be measured and corrected if we can translate the User's qualitative pain points into quantitative trends and design patterns that we can prioritize, anticipate, compensate for, and re-design the site structure, global navigation, and User Flows against.

So what is a User Journey? - It's typically a presentation containing a series of visual aids Defining Users, Actors, and Content, with 'The session Leader' taking a few moments to walk his stakeholders, SMEs, and developers through 'a day in the life' of our Users, illustrating them being engaged in one of the systems-based processes that we are here to design functionality for - sharing diagrams like process flows & page flows with the emphasis on the User and her tasks: showing how she logs in, navigates to her workspace, and posts a slide show of the recent off-site team bonding exercise at the local cafe, goes to her in-box to check for recent alerts & notifications, checks her task list, uses her ATM card to withdraw $20 from her account, and uses those funds to order a Philly cheese for lunch [or a cheeseburger without getting a hamburger by mistake because she fat-fingered it and clicked the wrong button by mistake] at the company cafeteria website...all the while feeling happy because her dashboard is clean and her in-box is empty...what a wonderful Corporate Intranet world we can illustrate if we only know how to properly recognize the design patterns and Design the better User eXperience.

Good eXperience Design: It's like the wholesomeness of Wonderbread, it's 'baked in by design.'

Think Web 2.0 is all about Social Networking and the Personalized Taxonomy? Your mileage may vary.

We’ve all heard the hype about the dramatically improved Social Networking tools within SharePoint 2010, but what does it really mean to implement these tools in a corporate intranet environment?  How does the use of Social Networking tools change the site structure and page layouts /page flow strategy from a SharePoint design perspective?

First thing you’ll want to understand is “what are these social networking tools and how do they extend & enhance the functionality of SP 2010 as compared to MOSS 2007?”

It helps me when designing large enterprise site structures as an information architect to think about SharePoint’s development components as rolling up into what is essentially three separate spheres of application development influence: My Sites apps for individual Personalization, Publishing Sites or CMS apps for Internally Public Facing content distribution, and Team Collaboration apps for Joint Authoring solutions around document libraries, discussion lists, and team & task mgmt. (typically deployed in a members-only context for use by many Contributing team members).

What Microsoft has done really well for 2010 (from a social networking perspective) is to extend many of the ‘cool’ social features like Interactive Blogs and Noteboard messaging from the personal sphere into the team sphere.  We’ll forgive them the fact that during the beta period of 2010’s release schedule their ‘progressive thinking’ was to do away with the existing Teamsite template from 2007, replacing it with what was essentially a wiki site (plus document library) renamed as the new OOTB “Teamsite” template. I think it rapidly became apparent that this oversimplified concept  of a team site (just give ‘em a wiki and call it a teamsite) wasn’t really going to meet anyone’s enterprise Business Networking or Team and Task mgmt. needs OOTB, so we were all going to have to re-create and save our own customized team site templates in order to get what was required by our target audience out that product.

What MS ultimately did unleash on us, the SP Developers and Users Community, when the RTM finally come out was a much more well thought out and practical package of Social Networking features made available within a Team Collaboration environment, thus facilitating communications among team members who are more and more typically spread out across geographically dispersed WANs and even across the Globe.

Features like an OOTB people search, micro-blogging capabilities via ‘ask me about’ tied to enhanced noteboard messaging, tags & notes, what’s new web part, my colleagues web part with people’s photos and status in a feed, improved colleague to org structure mapping,  and the ability to, in effect, ‘follow a friend’ by adding your own favorite colleagues overlaid on top of the corp. org structure via the ‘In-Common with You’ functionality.

These Social Networking features primarily originated from the My site/My Profile capabilities, but are now exposed to collective team environment via the “My Content / My Host” data made available thru what some are calling the ‘Social Database’, or my host data feed - basically a store of common person data shared across all ‘My Sites’ Site Collections (which you should note or know from past MOSS 2007 experience, everyone’s individual my site is actually a separate site collection with its own individual DB).  So now that you know what SP 2010 DOES DO in the way of Social Networking, it’s also important to recognize its limitations so that you can accurately tell clients NO when they ask for something that’s NOT Available in 2010 that they may have preconceived as easily do-able best practice “Social Networking” functionality.

Sometimes not do-able means it requires heavy developer customization, worst case scenario it means these customer wants are impractical even despite allocation of many customization scoped hours. Remember the three spheres of development influence that I referred to earlier in this article?  I’m referring to the Personalization (My Sites), CMS (Publishing), and Collaboration (Team Sites).  So far We have validated and are enjoying the creative freedom found in the fact that we can now extend some of the best parts of the personal sphere into the team sphere.  What Microsoft hasn’t done (and what customers are still persistently asking for) is to extend the personal sphere onto the Portal Entry page (which is, in effect a publishing site leveraging CMS), we’re talking about making the top-level entry point or HOME page of you enterprise portal into a User’s personalized Social Networking launching point.

More and more people are asking us “Can You make my personal My Site page replace the corp. home page; or else, at least expose my site personalized web parts on the Intranet Home?”  After having researched this and experimented with the various options several times (both as an independent consulting team and in collaboration with MS Architects on join ventures), we have determined that the answer, sadly, is No.  Due to performance reasons and the need to make allowances for the consideration of quick page download times, the first answer is No you don’t want to re-direct 1000’s of users on entry to their own individual ‘My site’ home page as it forces upside down the SP logical architectural model which provides a triangular or pyramidal framework mapping to the governance pyramid…where we find Publishing Sites at the Top of the Pyramid, Team Collaboration Sites in the Middle, and 1000’s of Separate individual my Sites site collections nestled down at the bottom of this iceberg.

And the second answer, again is No, it’s also not practical to feature staple or expose “My Sites” web parts onto the internally public facing corporate home page, a publishing page.  It’s not that it’s not technologically feasible; It can be done but is also inadvisable because of the ugly branching issues and roll-back concerns associated with forcing deployment of a packed personalization solution that doesn’t live within the personalization sphere of influence.  In other words, while the Company typically wants to feature staple a couple of internal marketing web parts on the home page together with you’re my Site personal web parts (so that stuff like CEO’s Corner, and Company News get pushed down to the user on the home page along with his/her personal content).  The next things that will typically happen are that corp. marketing decides that they want to make a change, maybe revise, add or delete a web part from their ‘pushed down group’ and then only newly deployed users get the new version of the feature stapled home page, else we force the new version down to everyone thus simultaneously restoring their my site content web content to a pristine rolled-back state (empty of all the personal content you’ve worked so hard to add).

So what’s the solution you Say?  It can’t be that hard you say!, well there is a happy answer…if you want to integrate personalized content and social networking activity feeds onto the top-level entry pg. or corporate home page, then the best way to do it is to integrate SP 2010 with Newsgator Social Sites 1.2 and then you can have the best of both worlds:  Facebook-like micro-blogging with roll-ups of Social Networking / Activity feeds on Your corp. Home from Community Home pages and OOTB MS enhanced Team Collaboration / Business Networking  on you Team & Project sites.

More on Newsgator integration considerations in my next Blog post “Social Networking vs. Business Networking: There is a time and Place for Both”

As large intranet environments struggle with findability and providing a logical browse-thru path to organically grown information, more and more clients are looking for an effective way of exposing deeply nested content that is not otherwise visible from the typical top-down navigational devices.

When global navigation bars and left hand local navigation menus become unwieldy or fail to reveal anything deeper than a 3-4 click drill down, how does one provides ready access to the more hidden (but often most valuable) content within an organization's knowledge and data repositories?

How do You do it? Think of it as cutting a swath through the jungle using a machete, You as Information Architect need to cut a path from the User to the data of interest to her while allowing her to skip over the rest of the 'in between' stuff that is blocking her way. There are two things at play in today's dev. environment that can change your challenge from a difficult problem into a world of 'can do' possibilities.

One, IA site structure can still be planned for in a more or less organically created environment; provided that, you can provide the structure of a hub and spoke model composed of nodes and leaves of data.  This is the modern cyber librarian's answer to avoiding the pitfalls of the more traditional or linear tree hierarchy. The other key to developing a flexible yet organized UI framework (under which unstructured data can be easily located and accessed) is to adopt a modern search platform with advanced metadata management and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) capabilities.  Fast Search for SharePoint 2010 is one such platform.

And while it may be true that one precept of good Intranet Information Architecture - the top down approach - is to provide good Global and top-down navigation system and User Interfaces that allow user to (ideally) navigate to anywhere from anywhere within the environment (which is typically provided via a parent site that serves as sort of an over-arching umbrella under which many more sites are grouped in the hub and spoke model) - It is also true that Improving Search Functionality is key to improving findability.

There are several great examples of modernized Search Applications out there that provide enhanced Search and Retrieval, facilitated metadata management, and combined search and browse interfaces with User-Assisted (or Guided) Navigation in the form of dynamic sets of refiners that allow Users to 'Search Again for More Like These' - thus improving results and providing 'lateral navigation' opportunities.

I have recently designed UI enhancements for both Fast and Endeca search centers that allow for this form of post search navigation from the search results page via left hand margin refiners and right hand margin widgets like tag clouds and metadata modifiers.  This is a good initial effort towards improved findability; however, improving the search results page is just the beginning.

Developing 'Search Driven Applications' is the next step, but is important for your planning efforts to recognize that each application can and sometimes must be another development project above and beyond the initial enhanced search engine development and roll-out. These Search driven applications can range in complexity from starting simple and developing a single widget to enhance a community workspace's visibility into their vertical's area of interest within the overall knowledge repository all the way up to designing a complete statistical analysis application that provides decision support tools in various dynamic combinations (or mini-windows) triggered by the contextual significance of the metadata in focus. The thing that You need to realize as an IT Development decision maker is that even though today's modernized Search Engines promise these capabilities, the 'production reel' demo describing these Search Driven features is often really highlighting 'the possibilities' that can be achieved with a combination of Out of the Box and Custom development.  Some features can be developed rather quickly by leveraging 'Out of the Box' features, while others require a dedicated project with an increased level of time and effort.

Good IA for SP2010 is about having a scalable design plan and sticking to it.

As you plan out the Sitemap and Taxonomy for Your SharePoint deployment, it’s important to remember that establishing a logical over-arching Site Structure for your corporate intranet must take precedence over the temptation to implement the latest trends in in personalization and Social Networking technology.  Sure, we’re all excited and impressed by the ways that the latest innovations in the Social Network have impacted the way we communicate and stay connected with one another, but that does not mean that turning the Home page of your corporate intranet into a personalized dashboard replete with Facebook-like activity feeds is right way to display the new technologies available to you.  Don’t get me wrong, I do find these cutting edge Social Data fed bulletin boards and personalized employee-2-employee communications tools to be useful and compelling; however, they must be utilized carefully as an integrated part of an overall holistic design that supports both the needs of the business and the design constraints of the software platform; for if we fail to plan the sitemap in such a way that supports  both the strong and weak aspects of the MS platform itself, then we fail to provide the usability of the communications tools that we sought to promote in the first place.  You should always bear in mind the IA’s motto “IT Depends” which refers to the fact that there are no hard and fast “ten commandments” of good information architecture; instead, there are 15-20 flexible heuristics that by necessity change on a case by case basis depending upon the context of the information in focus.

I think You all know what a sitemap is (a diagram depicting the hierarchical relationships between sites, sub-sites, and content nesting structures – sometimes a tree hierarchy \ other times more of an organically evolving hub and spoke model illustrating nodes of data (lists, menus) and their leaves (web pages and applications); however, you may not be as familiar with the meaning of ‘taxonomy’.  Well be perfectly honest taxonomy is a high visibility buzz-word that is often mis-used and certainly means different things to different people.  At its core it is about labeling and indexing of global navigation tabs, links, and content so that people can find what they’re looking for.  Taxonomy =The labeling and indexing structure of the application; taxonomy as it pertains to web sites is a library science adaptation of the original biological term describing the naming convention for plant & animal kingdoms AND as it applies to SharePoint, the taxonomy is a combination of UI sitemap and the unique nomenclature ascribed to the data nesting, hierarchy, and metadata of the application.

IF you are assigned as or have access to an Information Architecture planning resource, THEN You need to understand that MS SharePoint is really 3 applications bundled together on one web delivery platform: Publishing (CMS), Collaboration (Team Sites), and Personalization (My Sites).  Some of the enhancements that MS SharePoint 2010 has provided really well are to extend the MOSS ’07 functionality by making enhanced Social Networking features formerly available only within the personalization\ my Sites Sphere now extended to improve employee to employee communications within the Collaboration Sphere (these are tools like ‘ask a question,’ ‘noteboard,’ and ‘people finder’ that originated in the MOSS Personalization sphere and have been observed with greater depth in other best of breed Social Sites like Facebook and Digg out on the larger playing field of public-facing web apps).  What SharePoint 2010 still does not do very well (or even at all without extensive custom development) is to extend all of the individual users ‘My Host’ social data across multiple site collections and roll them up to web parts and activity feeds that can be exposed on the top-level Home page.

In My next Blog Post we will take a close look at what the alternatives to these development constraints are and discuss how to best work around the obstacles presented by each opportunity that these challenges present us with.  We’ll look at the potential success and possible failure points of each of the logical options such as “Can I make everyone’s individual My Site dashboard the official home page of the Intranet?, and if so, what would that data nesting structure look like with the content that typically resides at the bottom of the pyramid being elevated to the top? “Can I display personalized content on the home page (not by re-directing to the My Site Home for every one of my 50,000 users, but instead by exposing personalized content web parts from the individual employee’s My Sites’ site collections on the overall Publishing home page? – can I then combine that with some feature stapled Internal Marketing web parts that I want everyone to see like “Company News” and “CEO’s Corner -  A Message from Our Leadership?), and Lastly, we’ll take a closer look at the opportunities being opened up by third party innovators like Newsgator and bamboo Solutions.