Spending time and effort on the user experience enhances perceived value, brand value, and the ability to find solutions for SharePoint development projects. But you will pay the price if a poor SharePoint user experience exists--whether through higher development costs, maintenance expenses, or reduced user adoption rates.
Users will seek alternative solutions and workarounds if your company needs to incorporate user insights into the SharePoint intranet. Google Professional Document Suite may seem like the perfect answer at first, but once its initial appeal wears off, you will still face user experience issues; there is no escaping this reality.
User experience (UX) design encompasses principles from visual design, information architecture, and information design - but its primary goal should be creating tools that prove themselves as practical, usable, desirable, and adaptable tools. Let's dive deeper into each of these four ideas:
- Sound: Does your solution deliver content that helps consumers achieve their objectives? For instance, document rollup solutions offer integrated features to assist users in quickly finding documents while raising awareness among their team or company.
- Usable: How well is your design aligned with the mental models of its users? Specifically, all interface pieces should meet expectations when they interact with it. Any barriers encountered when trying out your solution should be identified and removed to increase usability and usability.
- Desirable: Desirability in design can often be misconstrued as "pretty," while its core concept remains satisfying user expectations from their frame of reference based on context and society. User preferences will differ significantly from stakeholders that intend to criticize a design's aesthetic qualities; designers must thus look past expressed preferences when meeting them.
- Adoptable: UX design must be practical and easy for its user and fit seamlessly into their daily workflow. Many brilliant projects fail because people do not use them; adoption refers to following through and sticking to an effort; consider what would happen if an effort to form positive habits like going to the gym failed due to never finding time or remembering to bring your equipment. Using your company intranet should feel part of the daily workflow rather than an interruption or extra task.
Developers do not need to start from scratch when working with SharePoint. Though some individuals believe extensive custom programming is required to achieve an exceptional user experience on SharePoint, excessive modifications eventually complicate application support, as SharePoint already offers many native capabilities such as Image Renditions functionality, which lets an image be transformed into multiple aspect ratios and sizes in just a single process.
SharePoint's taxonomy-centric nature provides another significant benefit. Not only will you need to consider how a site map might assist in developing the structure of your website, but you will also be forced to think through information architecture and taxonomy design aspects specifically, how to categorize various content types while linking pages/documents together. SharePoint provides an intelligent approach to content and metadata, facilitating an outstanding user-centric design and usability experience.
Read more: Maximizing Business Activity with Sharepoint Development: What's the Cost and Impact?
What Is SharePoint User Experience
"SharePoint User Experience (UX)" refers to how users engage with SharePoint as an entire system. It covers every facet of their experience with it, from how sites are organized and designed, how user-friendly Navigation is, intuitive menus and functions, and overall satisfaction.
An engaging SharePoint user experience is critical to encouraging greater user adoption and productivity, with users more likely to adopt and use SharePoint when it feels user-friendly and straightforward. Conversely, subpar user experiences may cause confusion, dissatisfaction, and decreased productivity.
Organizations should focus on streamlining Navigation, customizing views, offering assistance and training, using third-party tools, employing templates, encouraging teamwork, monitoring performance, and monitoring usage to enhance SharePoint user experiences to accomplish business objectives better and more successfully. Improving SharePoint user experiences could ultimately increase employee productivity and satisfaction and help achieve goals more successfully.
Tips To Enhance Your SharePoint User Experience
SharePoint can efficiently organize documents, collaborate on teamwork projects, and automate business processes. But for users unfamiliar with its features and functionality, SharePoint may seem complex or even intimidating in which case this post provides advice from an experienced SharePoint consultant on maximizing its potential functionality while improving user experience on this platform.
Simplify Navigation
Simplifying Navigation is one of the critical strategies for improving SharePoint user experiences, employing user-friendly menus and links to enable users to find needed items quickly.
Customize Views
SharePoint users can customize views for lists and libraries to meet their individual needs, increasing productivity by rapidly finding information when needed.
Use Metadata
Metadata refers to any descriptive data about other information, like document attributes, tags, or keywords that describe another document or content item. Metadata allows users to locate or arrange content more efficiently based on specific criteria by classifying or labeling content using classification systems or tags within it.
Provide Training and Support
SharePoint may seem intimidating and complicated initially, so providing support and training to new users is crucial to help them become familiar with it more quickly. This may involve offering documentation, in-person events, or online training courses to familiarize themselves with SharePoint fully.
Leverage Third-Party Tools
SharePoint users may benefit from third-party solutions like mobile apps, workflow tools, and custom web components to further customize and personalize their user experience. Such options offer businesses more capabilities and customization choices for specific business requirements.
Use Templates
SharePoint templates offer companies an efficient method for quickly building customizable and reusable sites, lists, and libraries across their business that ensure consistency in content and document management procedures while saving time. Not only will this save effort - it may even cut your expenses.
Encourage Collaboration
One of the primary Advantages of SharePoint lies in its capacity to facilitate collaboration among its users. Encouragement to work together on projects and content can improve innovation, productivity, and knowledge exchange - critical aspects of creation that ultimately lead to more significant innovation, productivity, and knowledge transfer.
Monitor Usage and Performance
Constantly monitor SharePoint's usage and performance to ensure it meets user demands and operates at peak efficiency. This may involve monitoring user behavior, noting any performance snags, and solving any queries that arise as quickly as possible.
Optimizing SharePoint user experiences requires an amalgam of education, customization, and support services for optimal use of this CMS system. Organizations may increase adoption and productivity while using all their potential using these expert tips from SharePoint consultants.
Conclusion
At its heart, any SharePoint implementation within an organization's success relies heavily on its user experience. A thoughtful user experience ensures users can work productively together while gathering relevant information efficiently from within SharePoint, moving through it quickly to complete jobs swiftly, and finishing jobs quicker - ultimately increasing adoption, productivity, and achieving organizational goals more rapidly than possible.
Organizations must focus on several essential areas to enhance SharePoint user experiences. Implementing user-centric design principles ensures a user-friendly platform and meets expectations; this process includes collecting feedback, conducting in-depth user research, and conducting usability testing.
Personalizing SharePoint experiences for individual users and teams within an enterprise requires customization and personalization of its SharePoint experience so that users may tailor it according to their personal preferences and processes through configurable dashboards, personalized views, and relevant content recommendations. Enterprises should enable this customization by offering customizable dashboards, customized views, and pertinent recommendations to allow this personalization.
Thirdly, to support users on different devices and ensure inclusivity for all users with disabilities, responsive design and accessibility must be prioritized. Keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility, and alt text for images give all users equal access and use of SharePoint; responsive design guarantees this platform stays functional across desktops, tablets, and mobile phones.
Continuous support, training, and communication are critical in encouraging user adoption of SharePoint and realizing its advantages. By organizing seminars, providing thorough training materials, and offering prompt assistance, users will feel more empowered to use it fully. Contact us as we are the best SharePoint Development Company.
