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!

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!

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!

I came across a new feature in SharePoint 2013 that has not been really advertised much. This is around the site navigation management and the new feature that allows you to drag and drop links directly into the left side or top navigation. I put together this quick video to showcase how it works.

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

When I attended the SharePoint conference 2012 a group of dream team SharePoint designers all came together over lunch to chat about design and the new design features within SharePoint 2013. One of the topics of conversation was around the Snippet Gallery and if there was a list of all the standard OOTB snippets. No one knew of any such list so I figured I would take a stab at it. See below the two galleries one for Master Pages and the other for Page Layouts. Master Page Snippets: Page Layout Snippets: Master Page Snippet Gallery: ~53 Snippets Navigation Top Navigation: The navigation snippets provide common navigation links and menu items on a site page. Vertical Navigation: The navigation snippets provide common navigation links and menu items on a site page. Search Box: Place the search box component on your page to allow users to search your site. Administration Site Title: Using the site title snippet rather than hardcoding th...

After reviewing the main CSS files that make up the base look and feel for the SharePoint 2013 look and feel. The number one font is “Segoe UI” which is applied to the global BODY element. One thing to note that for having over 13,660 lines of CSS within the corev15.css to only have 46 font-family references and 30 of them being the primary ones that shows the consistency and reduction in the amount of CSS used for this new version of SharePoint. Example: font-family:" Segoe UI ","Segoe",Tahoma,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; corev15.css : Primary CSS file referenced font-family:" Segoe UI "; (Used – 19 times) font-family:" Segoe UI Semilight " (Used – 7 times) font-family:" Segoe UI Light " (Used – 3 times) font-family:" Segoe " (Used as secondary – 11 times) font-family: Tahoma (Used as secondary – 6 times) font-family: Helvetica (Used as third – 21 times) font-family: Arial (Used as f...

In this session I will be going over how to configure your navigation to point to a managed metadata term service.

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 walk you through creating a new HTML Page Layout and adding snippets.

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.