UX & IA Design Thinking

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;}...

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 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...

I just recently needed to add in the default audience field control to a publishing page layout. So that when you edit the page you can easily specify the target audience for the page without having to go to “Edit Properties” in the ribbon. The only issue is that it is not as simple as you would think. In my previous post I provided detail on how to Hide SP 2010 Page Layout Metadata – WebControls however the “Audience” field control requires some additional references to the Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles field types. I found this blog here: Showing the Audience Target field in an EditModePanel #SharePoint #SP2010 #in #ProjectServer #PS2010 that really helped with solving my problem. So basically to add in the audience field control to the page in edit mode you would simply have to do the following within your custom page layout. Add in the following to the reference section near the top of your page layout. <%@ Register TagPrefix="OfficeWebControls" ...

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...

Have you ever struggled with the summary view for Links, Announcements, Events, Documents, Discussions or any other major type of SharePoint 2010 list or library on publishing pages? Well if so I hope this post will help with the identification/resolution of this bug. Hopefully Microsoft will supply a fix for this someday... Here is a common scenario: You create a SharePoint Publishing Site or you create a blank site and then enable the publishing feature. From that publishing site you create a simple links list. You add in a few links and want to then display it on your publishing page. You edit the publishing page and then click on a webpart zone and add the newly created links list on the page. From here instead of configuring the webpart to display in summary view you simply keep the current view and check the page in. You then edit/check out the page again and decide to modify the links list to show in “Summary View” to get it to display like a bulleted list...

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...

For content authors the ability to stylize web parts with just a few simple clicks is a big win. In some cases you might want to emphasize a web part on the page and make it stand out. There are basically 4 main web part styles/chrome that you can apply to any webpart. You will notice below that the chrome type “None” and “Title Only” do not have a unique class name so they will share the same style. The “None” style simply does not show the web part title. Chrome ( None ): . ms-WPBody { font-size:8pt; font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; } Chrome ( Title Only ): . ms-WPBody { font-size:8pt; font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; } Chrome ( Title and Border ): . ms-WPBorder , .ms-WPBorderBorderOnly{ border-color:#9ac6ff; border-width:1px; border-style:solid; } Chrome ( Border Only ): .ms-WPBorder, . ms-WPBorderBorderOnly { border-color:#9ac6ff; border-width:1px; border-style:solid; } ...

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!

Have you ever wondered what are the major font types, sizes, colors, and images for SharePoint 2010? This post will cover some of the major statistics that are related to SharePoint Branding. This post originally spawned the topic of why SharePoint uses PT’s for font sizes when PX or EM’s are much better. Kyle Schaeffer created a very nice post about why you should use one format over the other: http://kyleschaeffer.com/best-practices/css-font-size-em-vs-px-vs-pt-vs/ . Over 75% of all font sizes declared in the standard SharePoint 2010 base style sheets use a font-size in Points. Example: font-size:8pt; Below are some other interesting statistics when it comes to other SharePoint 2010 support file statistics. Server Side Files: Not surprisingly there are a lot of images that are used to make SharePoint look the way that it does. The number would be slightly larger if the sprite images were broken out. There a ton of CSS files and what surprised me most is the amount of uni...