Wednesday 6 April 2011

SharePoint - The Form Over Function Trap

I will spell this one out in simple terms. Every single time a SharePoint solution is led by user interface design as the first task, the project goes off the rails. And I have seen so many that have - why, because the user interface designer completely ignores the functionality that is required to achieve the business goals and places look and feel above all other concerns. Simply put, get the engineering right first and overlay the UI later.

I was reading an article the other day about how out of the box SharePoint implementations in terms of look and feel demonstrate a ‘beginner’ level presentation of SharePoint. It got me thinking about all the implementations I have seen or been involved with to date.

In the early days of my involvement of SPS 2003 I received some superb advice regarding customization by the lead MOSS architect at Gold Partner Silversands and in my personal opinion, one of the world’s leading SharePoint strategy gurus. He briefed me very carefully about the importance keeping SharePoint as clean and simple as possible in terms of branding and stylization and this has stayed with me over the years since. What is absolutely Key is that form is never placed at a higher level of importance over function, period. The opinions that follow are purely my own.

The reality is that just because you can do something with SharePoint doesn’t mean that you should. Just because you can customize the look and feel to the nth degree does not mean that you want to have to support it later. Just because your external internet site is yellow and pink and uses a high degree of Flash does not mean that this is relevant within an internal information management or collaboration system.

I, personally, have absolutely no wish whatsoever to brand Outlook or my standard Office 2010 applications and even if I could why would I want to?! I do not need to place a corporate logo inside Outlook for my staff to know that they are working for my company. Therefore why brand every internal workspace, every team site, every page, every list, every My Site, every profile page and every blog. In the same vein I rarely see heavy visual customization of HR systems, Finance systems and other business systems beyond the odd logo here and there so why SharePoint?

Well one of the reasons is because you ‘can’ customize SharePoint pages and companies tend to treat their internets like internet sites because there are lots of ‘web’ pages that are just ‘begging’ to be altered. The old marketing teams appear out of the woodwork grasping Dreamweaver with a new colour chart and then inordinate amounts of time are spent deliberating over where a menu bar should be glowing amber, spring green or coffee brown. This is often to the detriment of those who are actually going to be using SharePoint services on an hourly or daily basis.

Suddenly an intranet that could be delivered in a matter of weeks now has £30,000 worth of custom flyaway java-driven menus, style guides that defy belief and complex application of colour themes that offer nothing more than pure aesthetic pleasure. Some of the sites I have had the privilege to see are gorgeous to look at but I really do wonder where the business value is.

In fact thinking about this carefully I cannot think of any visually appealing intranet SharePoint deployment that has actually brought any extra value to a company at all. I have seen intranet pages that have stripped so much out of the box functionality away that it would have been far cheaper and quicker to simply have provided an HTML website. I have then seen how, at the eleventh hour, the same designers have realised this and then added custom ‘features’ (alerts spring to mind) to put back what was taken away creating an ever more complex SharePoint environment. I appreciate that web designers have to make a living, bet never at the cost of business based functionality.

Now do not get me wrong. I studied Fine Art at university and have dedicated my social time to all things visual and I fully understand the importance of branding, media, marketing and visual buy-in as much as anyone but I want business services that work, I want fast dynamic deployments of new SharePoint services, I want an easily maintainable system, I want to upgrade my platform without enduring re-customization costs. I do not want a team of graphic designers deliberating on new pages for my intranet and I do want master pages that function correctly.

There is of course a very good reason for style customization when one considers the challenges of local legislation regarding disability and accessibility compliance. Bevelled tool bars often present challenges to those unfortunate to have dyslexia and colour palette choices can severely affect those with colour blindness or visibility challenges. The provision of the /m mobile service in SharePoint as well as RSS can allow pages of content to be presented as plain text pages that do assist those with text readers for example. But all too often I am seeing very clever designs for SharePoint pages that take none of these issues into consideration.

With our media-fed generation of employees who have a greater sophisticated grasp of brand identity than any generation before it is critical to get their buy-in to new SharePoint solutions and visual appeal is thus often critical. But it is a question of balance. If you are going to run focus groups when aiming to brand your internal SharePoint environment then this must be with a SharePoint consultant present. Focus groups notoriously do not know about SharePoint functionality in advance of deployment and the questions asked about what they like and dislike are often without any advice as to what they should consider as practical and what they should see as not reasonably achievable.

What then happens is that the leader of the focus group comes back with a list of visual and aesthetic requirements as if it was business critical when in fact they are simply based on what people would like as a ‘wish-list’. In my experience the fact that staff like the look and feel of a SharePoint environment assists with buy-in but in the end I have never ever met any employee that agrees that although they cannot find the information they require, they do love the way it looks.

In this day and age time always appears as short, the working day is busy, we are stressed and rushed and we need to get our work done. That is every employee’s priority. Therefore when designing a SharePoint intranet environment, do consider a restyle if absolutely necessary, do add a corporate banner, do add some visually appealing web parts such as a clock or weather feed, but beyond that always ensure that what you are delivering makes a person’s job as easily as possible. I know you may hate me for this but the staff generally do not care if a box has curved corners or not because its home time in ten minutes and they need to file that urgent report.