Hi all, Totally agree with Tom. It will be a great (big AND wonderful!) challenge. We use Sharepoint for our Intranet, mainly for collaborative teamsites. It is a great tool with tons of default functionalities and not too difficult to configure for the average user. So, with many users with no "design" or "usability" experience, and the many functionalities and flexibility, we need to keep giving guidance to users so they have a good site, meeting their purpose and getting optimal benefits out of their collaborative environment. Some people need to be restrained, some need to be persuaded to go beyond the default templates. Some people fear to simply upload a document, and others keep asking for (or trying out!) things which are at (or over) the very limits of the system's capabilities. And everything else in between those extremes. Endless fun and variety guaranteed! ;-) Best of luck! Ellen van Aken Sara Lee -----Original Message----- From: ACM SIGCHI WWW Human Factors (Open Discussion) [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tom Brauch (Fpweb.net Managed Hosting) Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 11:11 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: What's it like to be a Sharepoint usability consultant? Ulrik, Best of luck with this. I think this is a great opportunity and by great I mean that this is a great big task to take on. SharePoint needs help though. I think you could be a leader in this field. SharePoint is capable of many things as a product, but could use some great Usability help. I work for a SharePoint hosting company (www.fpweb.net) and we hear all the time how badly users need help with this application. There are some great things people are doing with SharePoint sites though. Take a look at the sample sites section on our web site: http://www.fpweb.net/sharepoint-hosting/sample-sites.asp I think this would be a great job for you to take and I'd love to be kept in the loop on any findings or suggestions from others. Thanks! Tom Brauch tel: 636.600.8956 [log in to unmask] -----Original Message----- From: ACM SIGCHI WWW Human Factors (Open Discussion) [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ulrik Gade Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 1:13 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: What's it like to be a Sharepoint usability consultant? Hi, Hope this request is OK for this forum (couldn't find much in the archives). Apologies if I transgress. I've been offered a usability position at a consultancy that specializes in delivering enterprise solutions based on the MS SharePoint Portal Server platform. Does anyone here have experience with the pros/cons of such a job from a usability/UX perspective? My own current thinking is as follows: - The focus of one's efforts will be more on functional/content requirements and IA than on interaction design since the latter comes pretty much prepackaged with the platform - There will be some lo-fi UI prototyping but there'll be a strong temptation to move ahead early into building the product, since this is what the tools of the platform lend themselves to - There will be a lot of mixing and matching pre-packaged functionality, at the cost of placing pretty severe practical constraints on more free-form interaction design - Page layout, navigation and visual design will be both driven and quite constrained by the templates of the platform - Usability testing will be a perennial hard sell to clients b/c they'll (mistakenly) expect MS to have already taken care of this, and since fixes to any problems inherent to the platform will anyway rely merely on hoping MS pushes them to the top of their stack - It will be very challenging to create IAs that won't unravel over time, as users start adding content etc to the solution; how does this play out with SharePoint? Lastly, I'd be interested if anyone has experience with the using the product's site usage statistics to inform evolutions of the solution: Are they any good and do you ever get to make use of them? Thanks in advance for your thoughts and/or references to more appropriate forums, Ulrik -- Ulrik H. Gade User Experience Professional Skydebanegade 27, 4. th. 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