SharePoint online/Office 365 is a powerful, feature-rich platform but there are many usability landmines and design obstacles that organizations may not be aware of when migrating from an older system.
In this webinar Portal Solutions' UX experts, Adam Krueger and Cat Norris and migration expert Ryan Patrick Tully of Metalogix, discuss the landscape of UX tools, tactics, and best practices for your next SharePoint Online/Office 365 migration.
They discussed:
- Getting to know your target platform
- Research and content analysis
- Content types and layouts
- Usability testing
- Supported/unsupported features and more
2. About Adam
Adam Krueger
akrueger@portalsolutions.net
UX Practice
Director 14+ years in User Experience Design
SharePoint Expertise: User
Experience Design, Information
Architecture, SharePoint Front-End
Development
Culinary project:
Ramen!
3. About Cat
Cat Norris
cnorris@portalsolutions.net
UX Developer 6+ Years in UX Development
SharePoint Expertise: SharePoint
API, Process Automation, Custom
Development, User Adoption
Current Art Project:
Clay Dragon Spoon Rest
4. About Ryan
Ryan Patrick Tully
rptully@metalogix.com
Product
Manager 9+ Years in Consumer Data-Driven IT
SharePoint Expertise: Content
Migration, Security and
Governance, Client-Side APIs
5. Why Move to Office 365?
• Continual Improvements
• Scalability
• Access
• Decrease in Personnel Costs
• Up Time
• Last Migration
• Seamless Integration
• Reduce your Carbon Footprint
6. Special Considerations for Office 365
• Evergreen platform
• Managing customizations
• Hybrid deployments
• 3rd Party Considerations
7. Special Considerations for Office 365
• Evergreen platform
• Managing customizations
• Hybrid deployments
• 3rd Party Considerations
Always
• Straight OTB (no customizations)
• Utilize client-side API’s
Sometimes
• Relying on the DOM and front-end code
• Modifying master page and page layout files
Never
• Modifying the suite bar, system master
pages, or native artifacts such as content
types or layouts.
8. Special Considerations for Office 365
• Evergreen platform
• Managing customizations
• Hybrid deployments
• 3rd Party Considerations
9. Special Considerations for Office 365
• Evergreen platform
• Managing customizations
• Hybrid deployments
• 3rd Party Considerations
10. User Research (The Secret Sauce)
• Why Research
• 2x2 Types of research
• Content audits & ROT analysis
• Solve, Design, Evaluate
• A couple research tools
11. User Research (The Secret Sauce)
• Why Research
• 2x2 Types of research
• Content audits & ROT analysis
• Solve, Design, Evaluate
• A couple research tools
12. User Research (The Secret Sauce)
• Why Research
• 2x2 Types of research
• Content audits & ROT analysis
• Solve, Design, Evaluate
• A couple research tools
Content Analysis Properties:
• Name
• Description
• Purpose
• Audience
ROT Analysis Categories:
• Migrate
• Redundant
• Outdated
• Trivial
13. User Research (The Secret Sauce)
• Why Research
• 2x2 Types of research
• Content audits & ROT analysis
• Solve, Design, Evaluate
• A couple research tools
What UX Designers Do
(in a nutshell)
1. Solve: Understand the problem
2. Design: Create/build/organize
based on that understanding
3. Evaluate: Assess the solution
4. (Repeat)
14. User Research (The Secret Sauce)
• Why Research
• 2x2 Types of research
• Content audits & ROT analysis
• Solve, Design, Repeat
• A couple research tools
OptimalSort
Create your site structure
Treejack
Validate your site structure
https://www.optimalworkshop.com
Yourlife=easier
15. Verify Through Usability Testing (Getting It Right the 2nd or 3rd Time)
• What am I testing?
• Selecting Users
• Is it usable?
• Does it meet business objectives?
• Does it empower people to be
successful?
• Selecting Content
• Old vs. New
• High Value; High Concept
• Selecting Format
• Low-fidelity vs. High-fidelity
16. Verify Through Usability Testing (Getting It Right the 2nd or 3rd Time)
• What am I testing?
• Selecting Users
• Is it usable?
• Does it meet business objectives?
• Does it empower people to be
successful?
17. Verify Through Usability Testing (Getting It Right the 2nd or 3rd Time)
• What am I testing?
• Selecting Users
• Is it usable?
• Does it meet business objectives?
• Does it empower people to be
successful?
18. Verify Through Usability Testing (Getting It Right the 2nd or 3rd Time)
• What am I testing?
• Selecting Users
• Is it usable?
• Does it meet business objectives?
• Does it empower people to be
successful?
19. Verify Through Usability Testing (Getting It Right the 2nd or 3rd Time)
• What am I testing?
• Selecting Users
• Is it usable?
• Does it meet business objectives?
• Does it empower people to be
successful?
20. Education and Governance
• Educating (not training) users to be
successful
• Ensuring that our education teaches in
business context
• Successful UX concerns for governance
21. What is the SharePoint User Experience?
• Is it just Master Pages, CSS, JavaScript?
.....NO!
• Site Hierarchy/Sprawl
• Content Accessibility
• Navigation
• Content Searchability
• Consolidation/Split
22. Each Environment Is Its own – Just Like Each Migration
• Skip SharePoint versions e.g. 2010 straight to
SharePoint Online
• Manually recreate content or migrate
• Reorganize - splitting or merging sites & lists
taxonomy, permissions, content types
• Re-template sites
• Add metadata to documents
• Consolidate different content experiences
• Allow users to own their own content
Do you?
23. Strategy & Inventory
Updated Information
Architecture & New Features
Prepare - Reorganization?
Prepare - Migrate, archive, or
leave behind?
Getting Ready to Migrate
24. Plan to Leverage New Functionality
Community Sites
Managed Navigation
Social Features
Mobile Devices
Deprecated Site
Definitions
New functionality can significantly increase
potential adoption if used well:
• Managed Metadata & Navigation – find relevant
information faster!
• “New” file storage and sharing capabilities
25. Evaluate current business process
Consider existing site structures
Departmental/team reorganization
Publishing requirements
Search/findability
Navigation
Content Growth
“Over half feel they would be 50% more
productive with enhanced workflow, search,
information reporting, and automated
document creation tools” 1
1 – The SharePoint Puzzle – adding the missing pieces, AIIM,
2012
Develop an Information Architecture (IA)
28. Portal Solutions is offering a
free usability assessment of
your intranet.
Contact Us For Details
http://www.portalsolutions.net/schedule-a-consultation
Next Steps
Thank you. Download our E-book:
Designing A User-Centered Intranet For
SharePoint Online
Notas del editor
What is User Experience design?
My goal is to ensure that every Office 365 migration and implementation is:
Useful
Usable
Desirable, and
Adoptable
Continual improvements
Scalability
Being in the cloud means not investing time, energy, and money into assessing and scaling your server topology, equipment, and resources to manage them. The focus is solely on the people needed to manage and administer the content, and because of that forced focus, that leads to stronger content and a better user experience
Access
Managing external user access is much easier
Decrease in Personnel Costs
No need to train UX developers on server topology, solution deployment, or Central Administration
Personnel with experience in server-side technologies are pricier and more difficult to find/retain
Up Time
Building an infrastructure that gives 4 nines (the environment for users is up 99.99% of the time and only down .01% of the time) is extremely expensive and difficult to maintain. Microsoft provides this level of availability year-round with Office 365.
Last Migration
You won’t have to worry about migrating your data again. No need to develop or craft content with the ability to move it in mind.
Seamless Integration
You don’t have to setup Office, SharePoint, and the social experience for your company separately. You get the Office Suite, SharePoint, and Yammer all in your browser with a single sign-on.
Delve
Microsoft’s Machine Learning tool that learns the user’s preferences, what they are working on, who they are working with and pushes relevant content and actions to them to increase productivity and reduce number of clicks to get their work done.
Reduce your Carbon Footprint
Reduced infrastructure overall, thus fewer machines, reduced climate controls, overall improved energy efficiencies. Companies can reduce their carbon footprint.
Changes are happening all the time and Microsoft is constantly updating guidance.
e.g. the new document library [show screenshot]
This in stark contrast to previous releases of SharePoint on premise.
Microsoft is constantly changing the guidelines for customizations
Always safe
No customizations
Using OTB functionality
Client-side API's
Sometimes safe
Relying on the DOM and front-end code
Modifying master page and page layout files
Never safe
Modifying the Suite bar or Ribbon
Modifying System Master Pages
Modifying OTB artifacts like OTB page layouts and content types
Custom content types can inherit from OTB content types
Custom page layouts can be copied from OTB page layouts
The major investments in SP2016 have been on the hybrid end.
Though the security concern is largely a false concern, as Microsoft servers are designed to government intelligence specifications and compliance requirements. Their security and encryption technologies are unparalleled. However, that public concern is difficult to combat, hence the focus on providing greater capability to stand up Hybrid environments.
Hybrid deployments allow you to take advantage of O365 functionality (Delve, Video, or OneDrive for Business) while keeping content on a secure local server.
Delve: Microsoft’s Machine Learning tool that learns the user’s preferences, what they are working on, who they are working with and pushes relevant content and actions to them to increase productivity and reduce number of clicks to get their work done.
MS's official guidance is that they are no longer supporting InfoPath. As a result many 3rd party, such as Nintex, have grown in popularity.
Migration services [Metalogix nod]: Ryan will get into more detail here later.
In short: Research proves that we’re solving real-world problems. Without research your O365 migration decisions will be left to opinions.
“I’ve already done research…5 years ago I asked my IT guy which features he was intersted” – Good, do it again. It’s way cheaper to poke around and ask questions than it is to build out a solution that nobody wants to use.
Also, talking to stakeholders and hammering out business objectives is very important. But this is not User Research. Real tangible benefits lie where business objectives meet user objectives.
This is as jargony as I plan to get…
It’s important to understand what kind of user reach you’re getting. All of your insight will fall on 2 axes: Attitudinal vs. Behavioral, and Qualitative vs. Quantitative.
Attitudinal research is when you ask people how they work, what they want or dislike. This is how they feel about something. While this is very helpful it’s interesting how often this conflicts with…
Behavioral research, which tells us how people actually behave. Not how they think they work but how they actually work.
On the other axis we have Qualitative research, which is understanding behavior, attitudes and emotions. Qualitative research tells us why a problem exists and how to fix it.
In contrast, Quantitative research is the kind that we get from site analytics. If your insight is countable (time on page, etc.) then it’s quantitative. It might highlight that there is a problem but it doesn’t do a great job of telling us precisely what that problem is until we anchor it to Qualitative research. What it does a great job of is showing you the impact of a problem.
There are two primary types of user research that we do at Portal Solutions that gives us the most bang for the buck. They are
User Interviews and Contextual Inquiry.
User Interviews
The following questions are a sample of the types of inquiries that can help understand meet those interview objectives:
* How do you work on a daily basis?
* What is your role with the organization?
* How does the existing intranet help you in your daily work?
* Are there assets you were looking for on the intranet but were unable to locate?
Contextual Inquiry…
The two core research exercises for IA are content audits and ROT analysis.
[Moving metaphor: purge, organize and pack BEFORE you move]
The content audit is the fundamental exercise necessary for any information architecture design. This process includes a thorough review and understanding of all the information that currently exists in the intranet. However, you must also be sure to consider future information needs that may factor into your information architecture design. Some of the properties you may want to capture during this phase include:
Name
Description
Purpose
Audience
After completing a content analysis, you must then do a ROT analysis. “ROT” stands for “redundant, outdated, and trivial.” This will allow you to put your content into four categories:
Migrate – The content is effective, and it should be migrated “as is.”
Redundant – This content is served effectively by other content in the intranet. This means it should be merged with another content type.
Outdated – This content needs to be updated to be effective, and it should be done either before migration or right after.
Trivial – The content is no longer serving its purpose effectively and should not be migrated.
At this point we can consume our research into a more readable format such as Job Stories or Usage Scenarios. The kind of document should ultimately serve to help us understand what problems we’re trying to solve by clearly articulating objectives and context.
One job story might read: When I search my collaboration site I want to be able to refine that search results list by role-specific metadata so that I can quickly locate a document from among similar documents.
Once we developed understanding we can start to build. This might mean wireframes to show page content and functionality, mockups to illustrate look and feel decisions, prototypes to highlight functionality or site maps to show information design. What we’re creating here is greatly informed by all of the research up to this point.
We can now assess the success of our proposed solutions based on the business objectives and our user research.
While I’m not being compensated for my plug I have to mention two tools that have been beyond helpful for us in the past. They’re both created by Optimal Workshop.
One is OptimalSort, which is an online card sorting tool. This will be hugely helpful when creating your site structure. Card sorts allow you to have users organize and label content so you can understand their mental models.
Treejack is basically a reverse card sorting tool that helps you validate whether your site structure is actually intuitive.
There are opportunities to test both prior to and after we’ve started to design.
Testing old or new
Testing the existing site can give you actionable insight you can work from for the new site. This is much of what we’ve been doing during our user research.
Test new functionality before going live gives us opportunities to fix problems before they're in the wild
Which functionality should I test?
Prioritize High value content
Many people use it
Few people really rely on this
Prioritize High concept functionality
Innovative solutions may not be as intuitive as one hopes.
Next we select the format of what we’re testing
Low fidelity prototypes
Paper prototypes
Interactive pdf or Balsamiq wireframes
High fidelity prototypes
Axure
HTML Proof of concept
How many users do we need to recruit?
When User groups will use the site similarly
Select 5 users - 5 users will identify 85% of the usability issues. (Jacob Nielsen)
For User groups who will use this differently
Select 3-4 users per group
When selecting users remember: Stakeholders, designers, and developers on the project are not good users for usability testing. They already have a voice in the project.
Keep your tests short and minimize the number of other team members in the room.
Incentivize users with a reward so the test doesn’t feel like a chore (a giftcard is a small worthwhile investment)
(Jacob Nielsen https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/)
Big idea: Watch the person work and ask questions.
Important point: Ask them to think out loud and take notes
You can create a form to get consistent feedback
There are many design heuristics you can learn about but even without immersing yourself in interaction design literature there’s a lot to learn from simply watching someone use what you created.
It may be usable but is it ultimately useful?
To answer this we need to determine how well the site features line up with business objectives.
If it's hard to definitively say "yes" or "no" your objectives may be too vague.
Step back and revise objectives
Example:
Bad objective: improve usability of the site
Good objective: ensure that users are able to access key content and documents
Use your business objectives to frame your usability testing in a purpose statement. [show wireframe]
This will guide your questions and the tasks you ask a user to perform.
A good example of a purpose statement: "On the collaboration site layout we want to ensure that our users can correctly identify and utilize the content on the page".
Questions based on this
When you look at this community collaboration site what kinds of content jump out at you?
Important questions for determining whether your O365 migration will empower your users:
Do your business objectives align with your users' objectives or were they written in a vacuum?
If so, do users perceive the value? Do they understand what we’ve created and why? Has it been properly socialized?
Education (not training) users to be successful
Educating means the why as well as the how
Training says "this is how you upload a document", education says "this is why and how you should upload a document"
Knowledge workers are more effectively motivated by intrinsic motivators (finding something to be gratifying) than extrinsic motivators (like money or awards).
Being entrusted and educated to accomplish their missions creates intrinsic motivation.
Ensuring that our education teaches in business context
Ensure they understand that this functionality was based on learned user needs. We listened to them.
Successful UX concerns for governance
You need to determine Who is ultimately responsible for managing this
Frame content ownership as a privilege, requiring experience and knowledge of the area. Otherwise it can easily be seen as a burden to maintain.
Include (empower) content evangelists/owners in developing a clear strategy for decommissioning content so content stays relevant usership does decrease overtime.