What does usability mean in a SharePoint context? Can a concept normally applied to home pages and e-commerce sites deliver similar value on a decentralized end user development platform with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of specialized Web sites? Recent conversations with training clients as well as personal experience have convinced me that we need to rethink usability and information architecture in the SharePoint environment. In this article, I briefly review the usability concept in the SharePoint context. Next, I discuss my experience in creating a slide library using SharePoint, a relational database, and file folders. Finally, I draw some conclusions about the relative value of usability and information architecture versus workflow analysis.

Usability in the SharePoint context
As a generic concept, "usability" refers to how easy it is for people to learn and interact with a product to achieve their goals. As a discipline, it involves:

• learning about the people who will use a product and the context in which it will be used;

• observing and learning from users as they work with a product before, during, and after the software design and development process;

• participating in the design of the user-facing view of the product.

Web site design guru Jacob Nielsen recommends devoting 10% of development project resources to usability.

As a generic concept, usability is certainly relevant to any product, including SharePoint. As a discipline, it may also apply when SharePoint is used for intranets, extranets, or public facing Web sites. That's because these applications are usually large-scale projects that focus on a single or a small number of audiences.

But for other SharePoint applications, the traditional usability discipline is not such a good fit due to the following factors:

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Created on April 2, 2011 l Updated on October 28, 2011