UX & IA Design Thinking

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.