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Channel: IxDA - Comments for "What UX implications should I be aware of when designing an enterprise website/intranet on SharePoint"
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The link color was an example of a trivial thing to do for the purpose of demonstrating SP's inability for object selection, and I apologize if it wasn't the best one. Substitute any other css-available attribute you like, or Javascript for more sophisticated goals. As for the specific concern of accessability, my example was cyan and dark gray, which is just as much a value shift as a chroma one. The goal was to differentiate between different sets entirely rather than elements of the same set, in which case I completely agree that color and value is not the best way. Btw, there would be no way of adding further accessible text for specific elements for the same reason one cannot change colors: SP just doesn't give you access to built-in objects/variables. In a block of, say, users, articles, and tags (ex: Mary Jane classified "My Favorite Pony" as fiction) the only thing you can do is change the div's child hyperlinks. All of them or none. 

The above problem is, from my experience, most true with the MySite bits. I use it specifically because social features are a popular topic and selling point.

Marianne, I think your other point is also interesting and illustrative:

The biggest issue that I've found is that the enterprise assumes that the agency will configure search. The agency promises to do so and assumes that the UX professional will do it. The UX professional does not know enough about search and so assumes the developer will do it. The developers spend their time scraping knuckles trying to get the system set up, doesn't have the information to custom configure search and...no one told them they were responsible for delivering the Google experience without Google.

Who should take responsibility for this quagmire? To continue with the search example, consider the premise that users expect not much less than Google and at a certain point of underperformance (or different performance to be more accurate) would actually be irritated with the product because it deviates from their everyday behavior to such an extreme extent. Irritated users are obviously undesireable, and the designer is expected to anticipate such negative reactions and design something different/better. One could build visual and behavioral clues that teach and prepare the user to expect a different interaction, but SP UI modification is far from easy. Simply skinning SP isn't bad, but as soon as you start fiddling with layout and visual hierarchy, not to mention more sophisticated context-driven UIs, then watch out.

I don't think SP search is entirely horrible and has some useful features, but I do think it misrepresents itself by advertising more speed and power than it has and looking like something it isn't, and that's the problem. With Sharepoint, there are just so many of these kinds of traps, and by the time a new team figures out what they are, they've burned through a sizeable chunk of the budget. 


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