UX & IA Design Thinking

As a teaser, I would like to provide a sample of my upcoming session at the SharePoint Summit 2009. Roles: Information Architecture –Much of the interface navigation and page structure will be driven by the Information Architect. Designer – Skill depends on several factors, if leveraging native features, skill is very dependent on knowledge of SharePoint. SharePoint Front-End Development – MOSS-FED highly specialized skill set, especially if doing CSS-based changes. UXD Process:

Here is the final agenda for my presentation for the SharePoint Summit in Montreal on April 8th from 9:15 a.m. - 10:00 a.m. I only have 45mins to get it all in so wish me luck. Anything is possible Roles Design process Gathering Branding Requirements Create Sitemap & Navigation Create Wireframes Create Visual Design Tools for building the design Implementation methods options Additional guides/references Q/A Note : I will post my slide deck after the conference. Thanks for whoever posted that question in the comment area.

As I prepare my slides and agenda for my presentation at the SharePoint Summit in Montreal Canada I would like your input.  Please provide your feedback/comments and if you plan on attending my session! " IA and Branding Process: Sketches to Wireframes to Hi-Fidelity Designs". Methods to gathering requirements Benefits of a creative brief and Style guide Understand what functional concepts are and how they can be used Explore options on creating wireframes Creating the Design Composition (Differences between design adaptation and custom design) Building the design (CSS, Images, Master Pages, Page layouts, testing for multiple browsers and Mobile devices) Thanks!

OOTB SharePoint will not allow you to remove the 1st tab on the main navigation through the UI. To do this you can simply use the following CSS below and add it to your custom CSS or use the CEWP page style method to just make the change just for that page. If you look at the code, you will notice that each top navigation item has an ID. zz1_TopNavigationMenun0 (Home Tab) zz1_TopNavigationMenun1 (Tab #2) zz1_TopNavigationMenun2 (Tab #3) zz1_TopNavigationMenun... (Tab Etc) Since the home tab is always #1 it is always given the ID of "0" CSS Code: #zz1_TopNavigationMenun0 { display: none !important; }

Two tier navigation is not a new concept and has been out for quite a long time. However SharePoint OOTB does not allow you to have a global navigation that spans multiple site collections. Here are a few examples of a multi tier horizontal navigation. Example 1: MSDN: Microsoft Developer Network Example 2: Fed Ex Example 3: Wall Street Journal   During a recent project I was given the task to create a global navigation that had two tiers like the examples above. After some investigation my friend Sahil Malik had put together a great blog about creating a consistent navigation across site collections . (Thanks Buddy) Well this is great and all but his code replaced the OOTB navigation with a custom one. So after some hard thinking I figured out that you could create your own control that drove the tier 1 global navigation (Across site collections) and a tier 2 local navigation (OOTB) that was security trimmed. To get this to work you should use Shail's ...

I think we all know that building a custom design and master page requires lots of patience and open ended thinking. The SharePoint Meeting Workspace template to say the least does not play nice with all of the other templates and master pages. These templates include the following: Basic Meeting Workspace Blank Meeting Workspace Decision Meeting Workspace Social Meeting Workspace Multipage Meeting Workspace Here is what the template normally looks like: If you attempt to apply your custom master page to any one of these templates you will see something like this: Note that the navigation tabs are gone and you get a message on the left saying: " There are no more meeting occurrences to select from. " It also removes the function on the site actions to add or manage pages. The issues above are caused because the controls below a not included into the regular "default.master" file. Microsoft decided that all meeting workspace ...

All, I want to apologize to all who wrote comments on my blog and never saw them published to the site. I did not know that I had a rule that stated any comment left 7 days after the published date would need approval. I have published all appropriate comments to my blog. Again, Sorry for the delay. I will review and respond to all questions as soon as I can. Thanks!