UX & IA Design Thinking

My SP24 Session has come and gone but can be viewed at any time on-demand either at the SP24 site HERE which allows you to add in comments and download the supporting PowerPoint presentation and SharePoint 2013 Axure base interactive wireframes. However you will need to register to sign in. Or you can view my session below from YouTube! My Session Intro: Full 1 hour Session: I hope you enjoy my session! If you do not want to register through the SP24 site I have uploaded the Presentation and the Axure file to my OneDrive account. Erik Swenson UX Solutions Principal Slalom Consulting Twitter: ErikJSwenson LinkedIn: Erik Swenson Session Hashtag: # SP24S005 Leave a comment on what you think about my presentation and any topics around User Experience!

So come to find out my session was the second highest viewed session of SP24 (If you were not counting the Keynote). The coordinators have come up with a great idea to re-run the conference but in reverse order. This could be good or bad for you depending on where in the world you are located. For me on the Easter Time zone in Boston MA. My session will be starting on May 15th at 2am in the morning … But for someone on the other side of the pond that might be a prime time to watch it. My Session: SharePoint 2013 Creating the Ultimate User Experience I will bite the bullet and drink a few red bulls to stay up and chat online while the session is going on at that time so come and join me to talk about creating the ultimate User Experience or just to chat if you are bored :) I have posted my slides and the SharePoint 2013 Axure 7 wireframes to the site so make sure you register to get access to those files. My session should be available on demand as soon as the rewound...

This is very exciting! My Session on creating the ultimate user experience will be live in less than 24 hours! Please make sure to go http://www.sp24conf.com and register before all the slots are taken. I promise that my session will be fun, interactive, and you will absolutely learn some new skills, trips and tricks to create your own great experiences for your users. My Session Details below: SharePoint 2013 Creating the Ultimate User Experience April 17th 10AM EST Below is the session room that you will be able to view the session streaming the Google Hangout, chat, and ask questions. Also as part of my session this Ferrari will help guide us on the path to the ultimate user experience… So Buckle up, and hold on its going to be one hell of a ride! Session Tag: #SP24S005 Follow Me: @ErikJSwenson www.erikswenson.blogspot.com

Update: My session time just changed from 9am to 10am EST .  I guess there was a glitch in translating GMT to EST or other local time zones on the website. SharePoint 2013 Creating the Ultimate User Experience On April 17th 2014 @ 10am EST (2pm GMT) I will be presenting at the FREE SP24 SharePoint Conference . I hope to see you at my session!

My journey in and around the Microsoft SharePoint 2014 Conference in Las Vegas this year has many high’s and lows. The lows of course are all the times that the casinos took my money but we just wont go there… Here is a little user journey for you on my path to and from the conference. I have been to this conference before and had a really good experience both times. I learned a lot and had a good time doing it. This year was a little different… I was one of the lucky ones that knew on the day that registration opened that I was able to go fully funded by my company Slalom Consulting (More about how awesome they are later in this post…) When I looked at the sessions I was really surprised at the lack of User Experience sessions that were offered. The previous conference was pretty much loaded with UX sessions since the design manager was new and the buzz was all around the new branding look and feel. So I started building MySPC calendar and noticed a trend that I was adding a l...

I have been wanting to write this one for a while now. It is really amazing how UX is really finding is way into everything that we use and interact with. From Custom applications both mobile and on a desktop to document management or large data visualizations. There is always room for better usability and new concepts. SharePoint lists and library functionality really has not changed much for the past 10 years... I remember back in 2003 when I saw the same table/grid based views of documents and list items that exists in SharePoint 2013. But now we can look at them in a whole new way! In this video blog you will see how to create a responsive CSS table so that when the browser size is reduced it will hide specific columns. However hiding data is not always the right thing to do. What if a user needed those columns to filter on or to use for comparison to another document? Well that is where the custom jQuery Column chooser comes in. It allows you to see what columns are displ...

First off I would like to apologize for the lack of posts. I have been really busy with my new role as the UX Design lead within Slalom Consulting Boston. I will share more about that in another post. In a previous post Create Really Small Calendar I showcased how to do this for SharePoint 2007. However the 2010 and 2013 calendar views have changed and therefore we cannot use the same method or CSS as 2007. SharePoint 2010 Small Calendar: SharePoint 2013 Small Calendar: See video below for a video walk through on how to create a small calendar for SharePoint 2010 and & SharePoint 2013 with just CSS. Per the video above here is the code that I referenced: 2010 CSS link reference in Master Page: <SharePoint:CssRegistration name="<% $SPUrl:~sitecollection/Style Library/smallcalendar.css %>" After="corev4.css" runat="server"/> 2010 CSS: /**** Small Calendar ***/ .ms-acal-item{height: 10px !important;}...

SharePoint 2013 Display templates are one of the many new features in SharePoint 2013 Publishing site Design Manager. In the following video blog I walk you through creating a mocked up wireframe that includes a image rotator, document, blog post, and task query. I created a custom Page layout and also walked through the process of customizing and creating your own display template. This is all possible with the use of the new Content Search Web Part. Enjoy!

Thanksgiving just past and I was in the mood for giving! I just finished my SharePoint 2013 Layered Photoshop file. I have created these and shared them in the past for 2007 and 2010 . For this version I added in a couple of different templates and even some alternative background images for you to mess around with. All text, images, icons, logos, are editable and in their own layer. All fonts are to exact size per the OOTB RTM version of 2013. Use this file as your starting point for all your new 2013 branding projects. Provide feedback by replying to this post! Template Layers: Team Site Community Publishing Portal Download PSD File

25 FREE copies of my book will be given out Tuesday Nov. 13th 1pm at EMC Booth #629 . I will be there to Sign the books and provide a Q&A session after. Come on by to say hello! Add this event to your MySPC calendar!

In this session I will be going over how to change your site using composed looks (Themes) and also creating your own composed look.

In this session I will describe the process of taking an existing HTML file and converting it into a HTML Master Page within SharePoint 2013. The HTML file used is based on the Twitter Bootstrap responsive design.

In this second session I will be giving a brief overview of the 8 steps within the new SharePoint 2013 Designer Manager.

This is the first of a 7 part video blog series. Thank you for your patience. In this session I will be going over the SharePoint 2013 UI Overview and some of the design changes that have been made for the new version of SharePoint 2013.

I will be presenting a session on “ Intro to SharePoint 2013 banding and design ”. Here are some of the topics that I will hopefully be able to cram into the 1 hour session. I could easily spend well over 1 hour on each one of these topics… SharePoint 2013 UI Overview Design Manager Snippet Gallery Composed Looks (Themes) Device Channels SharePoint Designer 2013 Managed Metadata Global Navigation SharePoint Saturday NH Logistics: Where: Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), Manchester, NH When: September 22th, 2012, Saturday Time: Registration 8-8:30am EST Cost: FREE! Website: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/nh/default.aspx Twitter: @ErikJSwenson | #SPSNH I will be giving away a couple of my books out as prizes! Hope to see you there and do a little meet and greet after the session!

Since SharePoint was first introduced in 2001its standard visual design appearance has taken on quite a few different forms over the years. The base core features of document management and collaboration have stayed pretty static but the introduction of publishing and social features has transformed the product into a Swiss Army knife and can be used for many different things. Here is a look at its progress from 2001 all the way through 2013. Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001 Core Features: Base included document management, search and what was called then a dashboard site to display webparts. Visual Design: This was before my time but from the looks of it the design came with a standard header that you could customize the logo or title of the site. Microsoft SharePoint Team Services 2002 Core Features: Ability to create lists and HTML pages. Visual Design: The design got a slight change to the header and also add...

In some cases when you need to add a footer to a custom brand you will notice that on pages that have really tall left navigations (Quick Launch) and a small content area the left side navigation will overflow and display on top of your custom footer. The reason for this is that your left side navigation is floating to the left of the content area. And therefore it is no longer being considered for height and will ignore your footer. By default your content area will push your custom footer down as it grows larger. Here is an example where the left navigation is really long and floats on top of the custom footer: To fix this you will need to set the footer div to have a inline-block property and also set the width to 100%. Your custom footer will be included right below that DIV. See below example. <div id="s4-bodyContainer">     <div id="s4-mainarea">         <div id="s4-l...

If you ever needed to add in the local time and a date for the logged in user to your custom page layout or master page below are some ways that you can achieve this. Option #1 The first method uses a SharePoint Portal Web Control to display the logged in users current time. This control is normally used on the profile pages to show current time for the profile that you are viewing. One benefit that you get from this approach is that if you have users that view the site from multiple locations around the world they would see the current time based on the time zone that they have set in their my site Profiles. To add this web control to your master page do the following: Add in the following registration to the top of the master page: <%@ Register Tagprefix="SPSWC" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> Ad...

In this post I will walk you through the process of adding in “Hidden” metadata to your page layouts so that they are only visible when editing the page. For example if you want to create a news article with categories, start date, end date, keywords, and other metadata that might not be relevant to the consumer then instead of forcing your content authors to create content in the edit mode and then force them to update metadata by editing the page properties why not have them all on the page. This allows for a single page authoring experience. This post also provides the specific field names for the most common SharePoint 2010 base columns and web controls. (Really good stuff) Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls Namespace Standard columns that are used for most metadata column types. URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms413880.aspx Example: <SharePointWebControls:RichTextField FieldName="MultipleLines" runat="server" /> Microso...