What Makes SharePoint UX Good?

Editor's Notes

1. For example: A Chef – picks the perfect ingredients that go together. They prepare the meal at a precise temperature for a specific amount of time. They season it to enhance the flavors. They position each element of the food on the plate. Or go to Friday’s – frozen food, thrown on a plate, prepared by an untrained food prep who probably has little to know experience with food. A pen – you know a good pen when you pick up and write with it. Why? Because it does just that and the ink flows out smoothly and cleanly. When you pick it up it fits perfectly in between your fingers. Words flow out of it effortlessly. Ink is not spraying and smearing. You can tell a crappy pen when you have to press hard or scribble a few lines to prep it. The ink comes out sometimes and maybe a blob. It’s just blah, but yes I can write my name.
2. Can anyone explain why?
3. Example: the UI of your car would be the controls, the seats, the material, the placement of the steering wheel. The UX of your car would be when you test drive it and you take a turn or accelerate or stop when you need to.
4. There are several opinions on what constitutes UX. I most like Peter Morville’s “User Experience Honeycomb” Peter – is an expert in information architecture and user experience. He’s written a bunch of books and advise some of the most well known companies. He’s a teacher and blogger who’s been covered by Business Weekm NPR, The Economist, The Washing Post and the Wall street journal
5. SharePoint falls into a weird area because it’s not typically something users want to use but rather have to use for their job. This does not mean that anything is acceptable. If it didn’t provide ‘value’ then organizations wouldn’t use it.
6. Things like if the site is being monitored, a user can know they can go on there and someone is overseeing. If you click on a link will it go a file or the correct place?
7. Search Anayltics https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219554.aspx#BKMK_TheDifferentType
8. User need to get in and around your intranet in a minimal amount of clicks Very often our customers spend a great deal of time planning site collection topologies and team site templates, with exactly how many libraries should hold specifically which types of documents and none other. That's great. But it really is not worth a penny if your metadata - your information architecture - AND your search configuration are not getting the same level of attention. Use concise and consistent metadata for all your teams. Do not design your web sites and content types in silos. Strive for generic, company-wide metadata fields instead of data for each small specific team. Think common denominator. Instead of trying to cover everything from the start, come up with a minimal set and keep it simple. Use Content Types to allow for future expansion. Minimize the navigational depth of your sites, enhance out of the box navigation Design your topology for your users, not just to please your executives. intranet topologies carefully match the corporate organizational or even brick-and-mortar layout - until the next acquisition or reorg. But do they have to match? In this information age, is topology really relevant to your users
9. Section 508 Framework for SharePoint SharePoint is shipped as Section 508 compliant.  The problem with accessibility comes after application developers start customizing look and feel or implementing homegrown or third party tools to make the platform more useful. Accessibility in SharePoint 2013 https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj841103.aspx 5 ways to improve Accessibility Access to "More Accessible Mode“ Skip to Content Links Heading Order Use of landmarks Alternative Text
10. too often I hear "We definitely need a large image rotator on the home page" or "We absolutely need to show the weather". You need to take 1 step back and tell me, why do you need to show the weather on every page? People can get the weather on their watch or phone so is it critical to have on the home page? It's might very well be critical but that’s up to you to determine. The same goes for the jumbotron caliber rotator. What types of information and value with that provide to your users. We know for sure it's going to take up about half their screen, but will it provide a high level of value for the space it's consuming.
11. Content Owners - Who are these people and do they even know that they've been secretly promoted? You need to identify who will own sections of your intranet if you have not already done so. It may be 1 or many people, hopefully not just one person is stuck updated everything. Break up pages or sections and give ownership to the people closest to that area or the person most well suited. During the design process you should also be identifying the areas that will need updating, the frequency that those areas should be updated, who will be doing the updates. If they are not tech savvy then you need to think about training them.   Keep it Fresh - Stale content is a sure way to lose your users interest. I know, some sites might not change that often and that might be perfectly fine if they are not in the limelight. I am mostly referring to areas of the site, such as landing pages, where you have a news feed, articles, events, or images. If you have a news section and the last entry is from 5 months ago, then that's basically a dead area of your site. No one's going there and if you add a new article then chances are that no one will see it or notice it. I see this happen quite frequently but this point is further compounded if your home page is stale. Keep your content recent and update it frequently.
12. Some other notes – when launching a new feature or product make a game out of it. Make sure people know what you have
13. Lincoln DeMaris – posted on the ITPRO Yammer network Simplified by have one code base across products Aligning the user experience so they don’t need to learn how to use a library differently allowed them to address some long-standing usability issues – for example, you can finally upload folders in the browser! Responsive – works the same on a mobile phone Modernized meta data entry – it’s quicker and more seamless