By Daniel Antion, Vice President of Information Services at American Nuclear Insurers
December 07, 2010 - 3:41 PM
Most of you will recognize the title from the old “Doctor, it hurts when I do this” joke. Some of you will find yourself wanting to say that in response to SharePoint users who complain about their experience, particularly when “they aren’t doing it the right way!” One of the unique challenges SharePoint presents us with is the myriad ways you can find things, get to things, do things and make things work; all with the same result. I don’t want to offend anyone by using the wrong SharePoint title here (subject of a different post) but the people designing and building SharePoint solutions must constantly be aware of this fact. Here are four broad categories of differences that I have been reminded of during the past two weeks:
Data Sheet v. Forms – I was so proud recently when I created robust and sharp versions of the “New” and “Edit” form for a custom list. When I showed one of the primary users of the list the new forms, he said “oh, I never use those; I switch to the Data Sheet view and enter / edit items there.” Not only was I surprised, I realized that one of the pick lists in my shiny new forms would never be visible in the Data Sheet view, so I had failed to meet the requirements.
Search v. Navigation – This may be a generational thing, an emerging issue thing or a way of the future thing, but different people have different views on search. Some people treat search like their GPS, i.e. it should always be willing to recalculate and get them to their destination, even when they have made five consecutive wrong turns. Others look at search as an option of last resort; they expect to have informative and intuitive navigation aids clearly visible at all times.
Links v. Navigation – A subset of the anti-search crowd includes people who think options should be explicitly available. They don’t want to search for a document, but they don’t really want to work too hard to figure out where a document might be. These are the people who have 4,000 bookmarks in their browser, none of which begin with the current root server name.
Tunnel Vision – One of the challenges we had recently was how to alert users of our Internet-facing server that we were going to be upgrading to SharePoint 2010. We have a main “home” page where we have an announcement for all users. We placed announcements on the landing-page of each group of users (vendors, partners, etc.) and we put announcements on some individual sites. Still, I know we have some users who go straight to the Document Library they use without ever even stopping to visit the common areas. Sometimes, there’s no avoiding the email blast.
I know these topics will become fodder for my future blog posting, I only hope I remember them so they affect my future SharePoint designs.
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