I've been confirmed as a speaker at SharePoint Saturday Houston Saturday April 28 2012! Looking forward to meeting some new SharePoint folks as well as seeing some old friends.

I'm presenting "UX & SharePoint... Why Bother?" again. Explaining User Experience and how UX techniques benefit a SharePoint project. Make sure and stop by!

Very excited to be added to the speakers list at SharePoint Saturday Austin this weekend! I'm a last minute addition to cover for another speaker who could not attend. One man gathers what another man spills!

My presentations is titled "SharePoint & UX... Why Bother?" discussing User Experience and its Importance to SharePoint. I hope to see you there at the session or at least If you manage to notice that I am there, please stop by and say "Hi".

Stay Weird!

When I design a SharePoint site these days I tend to forget, on purpose, that I am working in that framework. I like to focus on the problems I am trying to solve and not the tool we use to solve them. Clients seem to appreciate that.

It is when I am developing the design in Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer that I am reminded that I am indeed using SharePoint.

In this case it's about the markup. I know, I know that it's better in 2010, but the web parts are nothing nice. There are so many things that drive me crazy about styling SharePoint I can't possibly comment on them all. I will pick on that I keep facing. It's that the web parts all have a background-color set. Why why why.

I am going to make an attempt at creating a background-color reset. The web parts themselves are the determining factor as to what styles are used. Each time I use a web part and I clear out the background-color, I'm going to add it to a list here on my site. Please feel free to add via email or comments to the list.

/** make webparts transparent **/
.ms-WPHeader,
.ms-vh-icon,
.ms-wpContentDivSpace,
.ms-vh-div,
.s4-ctx,
.ms-vb,
.ms-bottompaging,
.ms-bottompagingline1,
.ms-bottompagingline2,
.ms-bottompagingline3 {background-color:transparent !important;}
div..ms-vb.itx {background-color:transparent !important; background-image:none !important;}

Why do this? From a design standpoint it's crucial to control the view of the data. From a development standpoint I'm trying to speed things up. Playing whack-a-mole with SharePoint markup and css is the biggest time killer I can think of. There is a great reset of typography at Kyle Schaeffer's site along these lines.

Give it a try. Join the effort. Defeat the mole.

My Employer, Slalom Consulting is Gold Sponsor of Sharepoint Fest 2011 in Dallas.

The event is being held March, 16 2011 at the new Irving Convention Center.

Should be a great time. hope to see you there!

This year’s SharePoint Saturday Dallas took place at the Hilton right off the Tollway in North Dallas. Thanks to Eric Shupps for all his hard work and planning. I felt it was a well run affair with a nice variety of speakers and sponsors and a nice opportunity to catch up with some of my nerdy friends and make some new ones. These things are great for networking and learning and you can’t beat the price.

I appreciate the speakers taking a Saturday away from their normal routine and sharing their knowledge. Big ups to Derek Martin and Tracey Nolte from Slalom Consulting for great presentations!

Somewhere in the intersection of skill set, project constraints and user expectation lies a best practice.

I'm all for sharing information and learning and improving technique, but to try to create a perfect storm of steps to facilitate a UX process for a corporate standard... I'm not buying it.

User Experience Design is an odd combination of skills that make up a job title driven by industry need. The UX professional is expected to have a large toolkit with everything from human centered behavioral research techniques to the ability to communicate visually with your team, clients and whoever else has a stake in the project.

There are folks out there with very different set of tools than the ones I possess and I can not expect them to identify, design and create solutions with the same process I use. I have previously mentioned some of the things I do and when I do them. That however is not process.

For me it's pretty simple. My strength is visual communication. I use my business, communication and design experience to identify the problems that the software solution solves and then make sure everyone understands what the solution looks like. Is that over simplification? To be sure. But when you can distill a thing to its simplest form and still it works, that thing is something to hang on to. All the details are just a matter of situation and design preference.

Do you card sort? When? Why? Can you moderate a prototype or software user testing session? Can you draw? Can you collect statistics an data and glean actionable information from it? Are you good at collecting requirements? Does interaction design make sense to you? Blah blah. You evaluate the business constraints, use your toolkit to define, design and communicate.

In the end of a project, look back. See if you clearly understood the business problems, defined what a win is, kept the user in focus, designed and communicated the solution clearly. If you do that then you have used the correct process. Throw away the spread sheet, after all it is design and design gets messy.

Once again I run into an odd problem that I've never seen, nor has anyone on my team. Issue is simple. Try to log into your SharePoint site and it keeps telling you that you are entering the wrong credentials. Technobuff has the answer... Yes I noticed that this one is not new either.

1. Open Firefox
2. Type about:config in the address bar and hit Enter.
3. Type network.automatic in the top Filter bar
4. Right click network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris and click Modify
5. Enter only the names of your internal(SharePoint) servers in a comma-delimited list. For example: lon-ad-01,contoso and click OK.
6. Restart Firefox and log into SharePoint.

The folks at Technobuff explain why its happening. I just know you need it fixed NOW.

While editing a file(several) in SharePoint Designer I was trying to just check in the file. Nope. I jumped through several hoops and it would not check in or let me undo checkout. I was stuck.

Seems this is something of a legacy issue. The solution is simple if not a bit annoying.

1. Make a copy of the file.
2. You can now check out the original file. Do so.
3. Check original file back in.
4. To remain tidy, delete the copy you made in step 1.

Why does that work? The new copy of the file resets the GUID apparently and releases the death grip.

The fine folks at Andrews Distributing afforded me the opportunity to design and build their corporate website in SharePoint 2007.

HOW TO GET IT DONE

Getting to know you

Every good design process begins with exploring. You both learn about what kinds of problems you really need to solve and pick up clues as to how to solve them that come in handy down the road.

This project started out with a meeting to "glean what afflicts them" and review a creative brief that had been forwarded and somewhat filled out by the client.

What we figured out

Andrews Distributing had an existing web site and felt like it had run its course. It was built years ago with Flash and was a nightmare to update. Once more the design did not represent the brand that Andrews had spent so many years to carefully develop. So the objective was in fact two fold.

1. Create a compelling design that supports a very well developed and recognizable brand.
2. Make sure that editing the site is easy for non-technical users.

Show what you know

Once you have identified the issue and it has been agreed upon, the way tend to work is really centered around visual communication. I use drawings both on paper and of the digital variety. In this case the sitemap was that of a traditional brochure site with little variation and the workflow on the client side was non-existent. The real challenge here was to make sure the "mini workflows" that the web parts provide are acceptable for the team that updates the site.

In this case SharePoint 2007 was a really big asset. I spent a few hours and put together a working prototype. The client was able to spend time with the prototype and get a real feel for how to interact with the CMS side of things. Once we signed off on the web parts the site needed some visual design.

Make nice with it

One of the great things about Andrews is they have a very well defined culture and brand. It was a personal challenge to meet the standards and expectations established by the staff and leadership. I think the biggest boost to my design was a tour of the corporate office and a history lesson on the company. I even went on a mini photo tour and created some of my own assets for some banners. The design when it was all said and done was well received and is something I was proud of.

Results

Andrews was very happy with the design and execution of the site and I have received a great deal of positive feedback.

I have to say that, for me, SharePoint TechFest was a huge success. Even though I got there late and missed the morning sessions, I did get to attend the Keynote and afternoon sessions. It was as well put together an event as any I’ve attended, great presenters, great sponsors and an abundance of really smart people.

As a non-developer it’s common for me to feel like a fish out of water at the SharePoint events I attend. There just isn’t an abundance of “creatives” so the talk is rather technical and I end up understanding about half of what the “SharePoint Vulcans” have to say. This event started out about the same… a Star Trek convention without all the neat costumes. They did have great BBQ.

Things started looking up for me at the Keynote. The self acclaimed “SharePoint Dude” Brett Kovatch from Penson Financial Services was tasked with delivering and he did. Brett began to admonish the crowd to do the unthinkable. Gather and evaluate requirements with polls and interviews and USE the data to drive the design and interaction. Use wireframes and workflows to help the business stakeholders and SMEs understand what it is they are getting themselves into. Nice. Throw in a creative brief and I’m in heaven.

Seriously though, it is true what he said and I know that all the super intelligent people there are not strangers to the idea of requirements gathering and user testing. It’s common practice in custom development. For some reason SharePoint is not treated with the same kid gloves. I suppose it has to do with the “do it yourself” aspect of SharePoint and the fact that it’s really not as simple as all that. Gotta set it up right for it to work right.

Between someone (who knows SharePoint) agreeing with me on interaction design for SharePoint and all the great previews of SP 2010 I had some great takeaway. I’m excited about what I learned (understood) about SharePoint 2010 and can’t wait to get under the hood and see what I can break.

At the end of the day, it was great to see my friends from the various sponsors and customers. Meet new folks and put some faces to names and twitter accounts. If you get a chance to go to TechFest next year, do it. I’ll be there for the whole day this time.

Just got sign off on a design for a custom master page and css. I’ll be making custom content types and columns just for the home page. The rest of the client side layout pages will be mostly styled typography and the master page will tie it all together.

I don’t think that I’ve ever learned so much on the fly as I did on this project. I’m not sure I have ever needed to.

I was brought into the project having no SharePoint development or design experience whatsoever. As Sr. Interface Designer for a Microsoft Gold Partner, I really had no choice but to dig in.

I feel the issues I faced are common to folks who are new to SharePoint and in particular to veterans of custom application development. SharePoint looks and quacks like a duck. SharePoint is not a duck.

The issue here is that when you are used to looking at .aspx files and .css files and the like, it is natural to make the assumption that you are in a comfortable place that you have been in before. Dangerous assumption.

I won’t go into the details of the project. I’d just like to point out the some of the areas that SharePoint pulls the old bait and switch.

Multiple Master Pages
There are several Master Pages, not just the default.master.
That confused me to no end at first. I get it now.

The CSS Is Not The CSS.
The normal rules of inheritance and the cascading part of cascading style sheets are not followed strictly speaking, and as an added bonus some web parts use inline styles to make, typography, for instance a nightmare. Oh and by default the browser will render the site in quirks mode. Enjoy.

The .aspx pages are not the pages.
The pages that render in the browser are a combination of Master Page, Layout Page and sometimes a third page. This makes it crucial to know what all the moving parts are at any one time.

Web Parts
The business logic is compartmentalized even more so than with .Net Components. The Issue for design here is that all the web parts act as little mini-applications and it takes an extra step or two to make clear to the business what they are getting into.

I should note that I use only HTML and CSS (some JQuery) to brand the sites I work on. If that is your goal as well then these are some tools I recommend.

Tools
Heather Solomon’s Blog

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar 7 or 8

SharePoint Minimal Master Page
Microsoft.com Version

Heather Solomon’s Version

Starter Masterpages from Codeplex.com/

Do some research
Sharepoint Magazine: Customizing the User Experience of SharePoint

sharepointhosting.com

http://office.microsoft.com

Cleverworkarounds.com

Visio Template MOSS 2007

Erik Swenson

SharePoint Magazine: SharePoints Branding Limitations-part-1-6

Communities
SharePoint Overflow

End User SharePoint