UX & IA Design Thinking

As time goes on we learn, grow and explore in new areas that make us happy and inspired. I am very lucky to have found that path. Since 2003 I focused on providing great experiences to my clients around a specific tool known as Microsoft SharePoint. I was so invested in this tool that I even wrote a book on how to stretch the limits on customizing it. Over the last couple of years SharePoint has changed to be more stand alone through Office 365. Within the last few years I have had the pleasure to not only wok for the best company Slalom Consulting but also work for some really amazing clients! My most recent projects have been outside of the world of SharePoint and in all honesty I could not be happier. It is sad to see it go but I think it is time to pass the torch to other great and amazing bloggers that will keep posting technical posts on how to configure and explore new ways of making SharePoint do what they need to present the right information to users at the right time. My p...

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!

Great news! On April 17th 2014 @ 10am EST (2pm GMT) I will be presenting at the FREE SP24 SharePoint Conference . My session topic is: SharePoint 2013 Creating the Ultimate User Experience Here is a 1 min overview of my session! In this session I will walk you through best practices and tips and tricks for defining, designing and building a SharePoint 2013 UX project. These activities include: Identifying what users want (Requirements). Taking those needs/wants and creating the experience with Axure interactive wireframes. Using current trends such as flat design to create mockups in Photoshop for a slick modern UI that is tailored to your business. And finally reviewing design concepts for both desktop and mobile through Responsive / Adaptive web design. My Co-worker David Lozzi also has a session talking about taking SharePoint Public. His 1 min video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htClwprrW-E I hope to see you all 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 will be Connecting, Reimagining, and Transforming myself at the SharePoint Conference 2014 in Las Vegas! I will be at all the usual social events so hit me up on Twitter to meet up and share a beer and talk about User Experience, Branding, or whatever. @ErikJSwenson https://twitter.com/ErikJSwenson If you are following the SPC14 Yammer Network you can also find me there as well. See you at the party!

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...

With the new year a lot of people are finally making the move to SharePoint 2013. They have either never used SharePoint before and are getting a brand new experience or they have ridden the waves of 2007 and 2010 and are taking the steps to upgrading to 2013. With all the new great features of SharePoint 2013 I am still scratching my head on why the product team removed some basic features such as a consistent breadcrumb, site title, and description. In the video below I describe how to add back in the SharePoint site title and Description and ways that you can transform your 2013 site to a more constant experience that you had in pervious versions of SharePoint. Below are the code snippets that you will need to do this on your own. Site Title: <span class="custom-sitetitle"><SharePoint:ProjectProperty Property="Title" runat="server"/></span> Site Description: <div class="custom-sitedescription"><Sha...

I have been wanting to write about this topic for quite some time. In this post I will review what all this buzz is about around Responsive design and relate it back to SharePoint 2013. In this post I will not be focusing on any of the Twitter bootstrap or HTML5 boilerplate stuff. I will simply be focusing on CSS3 Media Queries and how it relates to SharePoint 2013. In the video below I have put together some discussion points around min-width vs. max-width and also different ways that you can make SharePoint 2013 responsive with just CSS. Per the video above here is the code that I referenced: Simple Responsive CSS Custom Responsive CSS Overall I wish there were more standards on how and when to use these media queries. I will be looking forward to your comments and suggestions for more topics. Thanks!

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.

Thanks for all the attended my session on Saturday 9/22/2012. The demo gods were with me and all things worked out. Per your request I have uploaded my presentation deck here: Erik Swenson SharePoint Saturday NH SharePoint 2013 Branding Because most of my presentation was in demo mode and it was not recorded, I am going to switch up my blog a little bit and start adding in some short recorded sessions. I have a 7 part series that I plan on having available shortly, which includes written and video how to’s. Session 1 – SharePoint 2013 UI Overview Session 2 – 2013 Design manager Overview Session 3 – Working with Device Channels Session 4 – Convert HTML to Master Page Session 5 – Creating page Layouts and using Snippets Session 6 – 2013 Composed Looks Session 7 – 2013 Managed Metadata Navigation If you have any suggested topics that you would like me to cover please reply to this post. Thanks!

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...

After 6 months of hard work my SharePoint 2010 Branding Book: Practical SharePoint 2010 Branding and Customization   is finally available for order from Amazon !!! If you are quick and order now, you can get it under your tree by tomorrow! This book is a great deal as it comes with 2 pre-built visual designs , a visual studio solution for applying the designs, and of course a great resource book to help you on your branding journey. The two Visual designs included in the SharePoint Branding Kit : Many thanks to Chris Arella, Matt Lally, Robert Dornbush, and the team at Apress. This would not be at all possible without the support from my family and friends! Happy Holidays!

If you want to allow your users to view/update their personal Status on any page in SharePoint 2010 follow these simple steps. 1.) As with my previous post you need to add the following to the top of your custom master page right before the doctype: <%@ Register Tagprefix="SPSWC" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> 2.) In your custom master page search for “s4-trc-container-menu” and add in the following before the “Welcome” control: <SPSWC:ProfilePropertyLoader runat="server" /> <SPSWC:StatusNotesControl runat="server"/> <SPSWC:ProfilePropertyImage PropertyName="PictureUrl" ShowPlaceholder="true" id="PictureUrlImage" runat="server"/> **Note that if you do not have the <SPSWC:ProfilePropertyLoader runat="server" /...

Here is a simple way to add in the logged in users profile picture right before or after the users name in the SharePoint 2010 ribbon. 1.) Add the following to the top of your custom master page right before the doctype: <%@ Register Tagprefix="SPSWC" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> 2.) Add in the following control right before the welcome text: <SPSWC:ProfilePropertyImage PropertyName="PictureUrl" style="float: left; height: 20px;" ShowPlaceholder="true" id="PictureUrlImage" runat="server"/> A nice feature that you can customize is if you don’t want to show a placeholder image if a users has not uploaded a custom picture you can simply change ShowPlaceholder="true" to “false”. and it will only show a picture if someone has specified a cus...

So, I have gotten a lot of great feedback within the comments of my blog. I have heard from quite a few people that they either just been tasked with branding SharePoint and don’t know where to start. Or they have a basic idea about SharePoint, CSS and HTML but don’t know where or how to reference the custom CSS. This is a long post so hold on to your hat! Within this post I am going to focus this topic on SharePoint 2010 but the approach could be used either for 2007 or 2010. Step 1: The first thing that you have to consider is how the SharePoint site that you are branding is configured? Is it SharePoint 2007 or 2010? Is it WSS or Full SharePoint Server? Will Publishing be enabled? What site templates will be branded? Publishing Team Collaboration Meeting Workspaces Search Center My Sites Administration Pages “_layouts/” Other? Step 2: Be prepared and gather all design support files from your visual designer ...