Viewpoint : Collaboration

The Handoff: From Design Comps to Reality, The Reality of Design Comps

RLaRue — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:08:00 GMT

Anyone designing for the web has most likely handed over their very precious Photoshop file to a developer. We hand the file over with full confidence that the developer will create a website that looks exactly like the comp. The comp that UX and visual designers, project managers, and clients have seen, loved, made tweaks to, spent sleepless nights over, and expect to see on the screen when the site is opened for the very first time.

Us designers at Rightpoint are privileged enough to work with some crazy talented developers, so the fear of handing over that pristine Photoshop file isn't nearly as daunting as it could be. However, there are some rules on handing over design files. These are rules I've created for myself through years of collecting information from the web (photoshopetiquette.com is a great resource), handing off horribly organized files to developers in my younger, more naive years, and learning from others (thanks everyone I've every worked with!). Here are MY rules to live by.

Rule #1 (and absolutely no question, the most important): Be nice to developers

I mean, you should be nice to everyone, but be especially nice to developers. And not just to get what you want, but to develop a relationship with them. Start learning a little bit about what they do, how they do it (ask them questions—it will help you design smarter), what their pain points are, and how you can help them. To me, there are few things better in life than learning from and helping your coworkers.

Rule #2: Take the time to clean up your file

As we all know, Photoshop files can get overwhelming while designing a website. Even the smallest of sites can have layer upon layer of graphics. For our own sanity, designers (usually) have some system of keeping their file in order. Even the best of us (I'm definitely NOT the best of us) stray from keeping the file in order while we're working. We change our minds, add things, delete things, turn layers on and off, and have "mystery" layers, aka type layers with no type.

Rule #3: Learn to use Layer Comps

No, not Layers. Layer Comps. They’re two different things, but equally as important when handing over a file. Layer Comps will not only change your life, but will change the lives of the developers it touches. They will love you forever. Trust me.

As you can see, the Layer Palette can get complex quickly. Multiple layers are shown and even more are hidden. Within the Layer Comps palette, one comp is made visible. Also, look at the third and fourth line of the Layer Comps palette; you'll see there are comps created for hover state and drop down. Again, a huge time saver. And as a bonus for designers showing or sharing work with clients, easily save a PDF of each page (File > Scripts > Layer Comps to Files). You can choose to create JPGs or a PDF of your file. It's like magic.

Three rules. Pretty easy rules as well. They’re guaranteed with the Rebecca LaRue seal of approval to help not only your life and the life of your design, but the life of your best friend, the developer.

Why I love reusable workflows in SharePoint 2010

Jeremy Williams — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:35:37 GMT

One of the most fascinating things (to me) about software development and version upgrades is the relationship between new features and (to what level) of marketing those features get… For instance, if I asked anyone on the street (let’s call it SharePoint Lane for fairness) to name some of the new features in SharePoint 2010 I’d probably hear stuff like: Managed Metadata, Business Connectivity Search, Social Computing, FAST Search… Don’t get me wrong, these are all very cool and helpful features, but there’s other cool features lurking beneath the marketing covers of SharePoint. And, just as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, I’m going to be talking about Reusable Workflows today!

So, what is a reusable workflow anyways? You know when you commission a brand new document library, and you just want to add an Approval Workflow to that list content type? When you click through to do that, what you see in the workflow-picker list is a reusable workflow! The nice thing about reusable workflows is that you have the option to make them very generic, or very specific based on how you set it up(and your accompanying taxonomy).

So I’ll shift gears from my pie-in-the-sky-speak here over to a real scenario:

Problem: I want to make a view filter by Content Type so that I can get alerts on certain content types in a library

Issue: Turns out that alerts don’t like to work for views based on System-Columns (like content types) http://chanakyajayabalan.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/no-able-to-set-alerts-for-some-views-in-sharepoint-list/

Solution – Brief: The quick and easy solution is just to add a column to each Content Type in question, hard-code a value in there, and then filter on that value. This will certainly get the job done, but I like to over-complicate and bullet-proof things a bit more… As such, I’m going to create a reusable workflow, attach it to some content types, and then filter on my own workflow-set column.

Solution – Walkthrough:

I’m going to set up my taxonomy for this situation; this includes one column of type: Single line of Text. I called this column, “Filter CT”.
Next, I’m going to open up SharePoint Designer 2010 and make my reusable workflow. After opening up the appropriate site, press ‘Reusable Workflow’ under the New grouping of the ‘Site’ ribbon tab.
Go ahead and name your workflow, type a description if you’d like, and choose whether you’d like to filter on Content Type. For my situation, I just chose the ‘All’ Content Type selection. This will minimize the columns I get ‘for free’, but will maximize the utility of my workflow. Once you’re ready, go ahead and press Ok to create your workflow and get into the visual design area.
To get access to your custom column, press the button on the ribbon:
Press ‘Select Site Column’ and scroll until you find your column created in Step One. Select it and press Ok (twice) to get back to the workflow design area.
Now you’ll have access to your column from the Workflow Design Area. Go ahead and set the logic to the screenshot below, and then Publish your workflow:
Alright, we’re done in SPD, so head on back to SharePoint…What we’re going to do now is navigate to the Site Content Type area… We’re going to be making two content types (Disney Document and Warner Bros Document <—Yeah, I’m not creative today). The content types will be identical except in name, and should include the custom column you made in step 1. [Note: The right thing to do here is create three content types, the first would by your Theme Park Base Document content type, and you’d then create the Disney/Warner Bros Content Types to inherit the Theme Park Base Document. However, since I was just doing a Proof of Concept, I was lazy :-)]
Then, to make the workflow fire automatically, press on the Workflow Settings link, click ‘Add a workflow’ and configure it similarly to:
Now, add those content types to your library, add some documents of each content type, and then create two views that filter based on your Filter CT value. For my example, I have 1 of each document:
Here’s my view of just Disney Documents:
And to finally solve our problem, I can make an alert based on the Disney Content Type (as seen below):

Conclusion: What I just walked through is a very specific, and somewhat simplistic use of the reusable workflow model. The reason I love reusable workflows is that you get all of the power of workflow, and you can reuse that over and over across your SharePoint Site Structure. I hope this post has been helpful, thanks!

Background: Much of the inspiration for my posts come from issues I see our clients facing and/or discussions I have with my esteemed coworkers. For today’s post, I’d like to thank and credit Jonathan Rupp and Kim Frehe, as the topic I just discussed calls out some of their problems, solutions, and scenarios as it relates to this post.

What's Electronic Document Workflow? Why Should You Care?

Matt Forcey — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:19:00 GMT

By Matt Forcey

Electronic document workflows enable information workers (this means you) to work together on documents, and to manage project tasks by applying business processes to documents and items managed within an enterprise content management system (ECM). Exciting huh? Now think about it in terms of your bottom line. Workflows can help your organization enforce coherent business processes, as well as improve organizational effectiveness and productivity by managing the tasks and steps involved in these business processes. This allows the people responsible for these tasks to focus on performing the work rather than spending time administering the workflow processes. Interested yet? If not, it doesn't get any more thrilling than this. I'd recommend that you just take a look at the funny cartoon and move on.

Now, for those still with me, "workflow" is generally defined as a series of tasks that produce an outcome. In the context of enterprise content management, workflow is defined more succinctly as the automated movement of documents or items through a sequence of actions or tasks that are related to a business process.

Workflows can be employed to consistently manage common business processes within a company by enabling the organization to affix business logic to documents or items in a content management system’s lists or libraries. Business logic is essentially a set of instructions that specify and control the actions that happen to a document or item. By managing and tracking the human tasks involved with these processes, workflows can streamline the cost and time necessary to coordinate common business processes, such as project approval or document review. For example, within your content management framework, users can add a workflow to a document library that routes a document to a group of co-workers for review, comment, and approval.

When a document author initiates a workflow on a document within the chosen document library, the defined workflow automatically creates document review and approval tasks, delegates these tasks to the appropriate workflow participants, then sends e-mail alerts to the participants with task instructions and a link to the document to be reviewed. While the workflow is in progress, the workflow process owner (in this case, the document author) can check a “workflow status” dashboard to see which participants have completed their workflow tasks. When the workflow participants finish their assigned tasks, the workflow ends, and the workflow owner is automatically alerted that the workflow has completed.

In addition to supporting human work processes, electronic document workflows also broaden the ways in which people can collaborate and work with available documents, lists, and libraries. ECM users can be empowered to create and participate in workflows by using customizable forms that are made available at the document, list, and/or library level.

Other advanced forms of workflow allow multiple users to view and modify (or markup) a document at the same time in a collaborative online session. The resulting document would be viewable in its final shape, while also storing the markups done by each individual user during the collaborative workflow session.

Now you have a basic understanding of workflow and how it might benefit your organization. Is your company using a content management system with workflow capabilities? Is your current system closely integrated with the business productivity tools commonly used to create and view electronic documents (word processing, spreadsheets, email, etc)? CLICK HERE to discover four new ways to engage your employees using ECM tools.

Enterprise’s Internal Communications can Transform itself into a Social Business

jwillinger — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 21:54:00 GMT

The most successful examples of social businesses include those who are already using social processes and tools internally. Those business that systematically encourage openness inside the organization are the most likely to empower employees to engage with the outside world. SharePoint tends to be that glue.

These are ways an enterprise’s internal communications can transform itself into a social business:

• A process with social guidelines is already in place. (For example, Microsoft co-created their guidelines, with employees.)

• Employees use social tools to collaborate internally, before opening up external gates. (Examples: employee networks on Facebook, Yammer, Newsgator, Jive, and Social Text.)

• Companies reconsider the role of individuals in the company, with greater value of and incentives for extra market forces and nonfinancial drivers, including an individual’s sense of meaning and purpose.

5 of the 10 Best Intranets in the World Run SharePoint

jwillinger — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 23:07:00 GMT

Jakob Nielsen, the world's leading expert on Web usability has listed his best in class intranets. It is no surprise that half of the sites were developed in SharePoint, which i live and breathe daily.

SharePoint 2010 is the business collaboration platform that enables you to connect and empower people through formal and informal business communities, within the enterprise and beyond, and to manage content throughout the information lifecycle. Whether deployed on-premises or as hosted services, SharePoint’s integrated capabilities are enhanced by search technologies and enable you to rapidly respond to changing business needs by making data-driven decisions and by deploying customized solutions quickly and securely. The consolidation of collaboration solutions onto SharePoint 2010 makes it possible to cut costs by lowering training and maintenance expenses and increasing IT productivity, all within a governable and compliant platform.

10 Best Intranets of 2009

Summary:
Intranets are getting more strategic, with increased collaboration support. Team size is growing by 12% per year, and platforms are becoming integrated, with a strong showing for SharePoint. Improving usability increased use by 106% on average.

The winners of the award for 10 best-designed intranets for 2009 are:

Altran, a large engineering and innovation consultancy (France)
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a developer of computer and graphics processors (USA)
BASF SE, the world's leading chemical manufacturing company (Germany)
COWI Group A/S, a consulting group focusing on engineering, environmental science, and economics (Denmark)
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT), a global professional services network providing audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services (a Global member organization)
Environmental Resources Management (ERM), one of the world's leading providers of environmental consulting services (Global)
HSBC Bank Brazil (Brazil)
Kaupthing Bank (Iceland)
L.L.Bean, a vendor of apparel and outdoor equipment (USA)
McKesson Corporation, a large provider of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and health care information technologies (USA)

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu also won in 2002 for its Australian member firm's intranet; this year, DTT's worldwide intranet is the winner. As such, DTT joins a very small, elite group of companies that has won the award twice: Cisco Systems is the only other member.

As we've seen every year, great intranets are found around the world and in all industries. This year, we have our first winner from Latin America. We also have the first winners from Denmark, France, and Iceland; Germany and the U.S. have both provided many winners in the past. We have one other first this year: In a sign of ongoing globalization trends, we have winners that are not headquartered in any individual country.

The consulting sector is this year's best-represented industry, with 3 winners. Given the knowledge-intensive nature of consulting and this year's trend toward more collaboration-focused intranets, this fact makes sense.

Bigger Intranet Budgets

As we've seen the last few years, large companies dominate among the winners. Among this year's winners, the average organization has 37,500 employees. Even so, fairly small companies like Kaupthing Bank with 3,200 employees can still win. Good user experience doesn't require size or humongous budgets; it requires talent and emphasis on meeting the users' needs.

One of the strongest trends over the years that we've run this design competition is that intranet teams have been getting bigger. As the following chart shows, when we started honoring intranet projects in 2001, the average winning team had 6 members; today, the average team size is 14.

The long-term trend is toward bigger intranet teams, with a growth rate of 12% per year.

Still, what holds for company size also holds for the size of teams: You don't have to be big to win. This year's winners include one team with 5 members and another team with 6 members. In earlier years, we've honored winners with 1- or 2-person teams.

Even this year's average team size of 14 is fairly small when it comes to providing a key work tool for organizations with 37,500 employees on average. One way to leverage intranet staff is to call on external resources as appropriate. Today, the predominant approach to running intranet design projects is to engage one or more consultants and external agencies to contribute parts — and only parts — of the design, while keeping overall control inside the company itself.

This year, 6 of the 10 winners were designed by some combination of in-house and outside resources. The remaining 4 projects were done completely by the company's own staff. None of the winning intranets were designed exclusively by an external agency, even though this was a fairly common approach in earlier years.

It's a healthy trend for companies to take more ownership of their intranets and devote resources to building sufficiently large intranet teams. In so doing, they gain in-house expertise in the main areas of intranet user experience. Not all companies can afford intranet teams that are big enough to do everything on their own, however. And, in any case, there are at least three reasons to periodically engage outsiders:

To get a fresh, independent perspective. People who work on the same project for years can become too accustomed to a certain way of doing things. (Disclaimer: Because Nielsen Norman Group sometimes serves this role through impartial usability reviews or unbiased user testing, we might certainly be too sympathetic to the value of an outside perspective.)
To provide deep expertise or a narrow skill set that the intranet team cannot justify adding to their permanent, full-time headcount.
To alleviate workload during crunch times, particularly during large redesign projects or rollouts.

Strategic Intranets

Bigger intranet teams and increasing internal ownership of the intranet user experience both reflect the intranet's growing strategic role in supporting work processes.

Intranets today do much more than simply host the company phone book and HR manuals — though these components remain critically important, and teams are continuing to improve them. COWI, for example, supplemented employee profiles with a feature that highlights commonalities between directory users and the profiled employees they view (an interesting combination of personalization, social networking, and the traditional staff directory.)

Nonetheless, with bigger teams and budgets and increased respect and strategic recognition, intranet functionality is expanding beyond such basic features. A simple statistic to quantify this trend is the fact that, at 473 pages, this year's Intranet Design Annual is the most voluminous ever (326% longer than the first Design Annual in 2001, and 31% longer than last year's report). As intranet teams accomplish more, more space is required to document the winning designs.

Another indication of the intranet's growing strategic importance is the fact that ERM is the first winning team that reports directly to the company chairman. As in past years, most other winners report to either Corporate Communications or IT, and having teams report to the top isn't likely to become commonplace. But this year does show dramatically increased executive visibility for the intranet in many of the winning organizations. This executive involvement typically results from companies viewing the intranet as a collaboration tool and appreciating the increased business efficiency that a good intranet brings.

Collaboration Features

This year's winners showed a substantial increase in both collaboration support and social networking features. Although inspired by the open Internet's "Web 2.0" sites, these features often have a much stronger business model within the enterprise, simply because they're more useful and less subject to noise and information pollution by bozos.

The most symbolic instantiation of this trend might be at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, where employees can add their own videos to the corporate TV network. Quite the enterprise YouTube.

Teams are also adding Facebook-like features to employee directories to enrich the profiles. That said, the designs are for a work environment — not for commenting on personal photos or supporting teenage dating behaviors. So, while it's appropriate to be inspired by popular social networking websites, your actual user interface and features must be freshly designed specifically for the intranet. Internal blogs — whether by employees, department heads, or company leaders — were also thicker on the ground than in previous years.

The vast majority of our winning intranets feature CEO blogs. This is not new; we've seen some CEO blogs in earlier years. Indeed, HSBC Bank Brazil's CEO blog started in 2005 and has since been viewed more than 2 million times and accumulated 8,000 employee comments. These statistics imply about 1 comment for every 250 employee viewings of the CEO blog, a level that's consistent with other research on user participation in online communities. You can use this level as a rough benchmark to assess whether your own CEO blog is sufficiently inviting of employee participation.

Clearly, it's a well-established feature. What's new this year is the sheer prevalence of this communications tool; we now have enough good examples to specify 9 guidelines for an intranet CEO blog.

Another example of a striking social feature is ERM's interactive forum. This tool has achieved mission-critical status in allowing consultants to post urgent requests for advice from their colleagues around the world. The forum has virtually eliminated panicky broadcast emails at ERM, thus improving the productivity of the many knowledge workers who are no longer interrupted by requests that they might have no qualifications or experience to solve. Even more important, this community feature often helps the company quickly construct better proposals for key clients on short deadlines.

Personalization and Customization

As many of this year's winners show, intranet personalization is becoming increasingly sophisticated. The leading application of personalization is to provide each employee with news updates focused on their job role and personal interests. If intranets show everyone everything, information overload ensues and people either ignore the news area or squander their time reading irrelevant stories.

Simple customization can often generate sizeable productivity wins. For example, at McKesson, sales people can create a My Product List and My Favorite Reports, freeing them from having to wade through the much longer lists of all available options. Much appreciated when you're on the phone with a customer and would prefer to focus your mental resources on closing the sale, rather than navigating the intranet.

At AMD, users can customize links directly in the main menu bar, which integrates the user's personal favorites much more tightly with the intranet navigation than the traditionally separate Quick Links feature.

Multilingual intranets also make good use of personalization to increase usability by presenting pages in the user's preferred language as much as possible. BASF's main user interface elements are available in 13 different languages, and several other winners also have internationalization and localization support that goes far beyond what we see in most Internet websites.

Technology Platform: Unification Begins

In all previous years, the only conclusion regarding technology was that there was no universal platform for designing good intranets. Winners typically used an extraordinarily wide diversity of implementation packages.

Although this conclusion continues to hold this year, it is less pronounced.

Among the winning intranets, many are built on a single intranet platform that integrates most of the supporting features they need — including a content management system (CMS) and search. Some winners supplement their main platform with a few selected tools for specialized purposes — mainly Web analytics. If we were to hazard a prediction, it would be that traffic statistics, search log analysis, and other analytics tools will be substantially beefed up and integrated in future releases of the main intranet software platforms.

In total, the 10 winners were built on 26 different products — substantially fewer than the 41 used in 2008 or the 49 used in 2007. Most impressively, fully half of the winning intranets used SharePoint, especially the recent MOSS platform (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007). As the following chart shows, SharePoint use has grown dramatically in recent years. This is particularly impressive given that, from 2003–2006, the winning intranets didn't use earlier versions of SharePoint at all.

Microsoft SharePoint has seen substantially increased use among well-designed intranets in recent years.
(In 2007, Microsoft's own intranet was a winner, and they obviously used their own software, so the 2007 dot should be a notch lower if you consider only third-party projects.)

Despite this big growth in SharePoint use among the best intranets, the contest is far from over for intranet software platforms. Many other good enterprise software vendors offer widely used solutions. This year, for example, multiple winners used Autonomy, Google Search, and WebTrends.

Usability Growth

Over our intranet award's 9-year history, we've seen a steady increase in user-centered design. The following chart shows the proportion of winning intranets that employed various methods across three different 3-year periods. The use of all methods has substantially increased; it's particularly gratifying to see the extent to which designers are embracing paper prototyping and other low-cost testing methods.

The percent of winning intranets that employed some of the main usability methods in their design process.

To assess the ROI of intranet redesigns, teams primarily relied on usage metrics in terms of users, visits, or page views. Across this year's winners, the average increase in intranet use was 106%. This is about the same as we've seen in previous years: The average usage increase in the 2005–2008 winners was 110%. So, roughly speaking, improving an intranet's usability will double its use.

L.L.Bean conducted a benchmark study comparing their old and new designs. The old intranet had a success rate of 67% and an average time-on-task of 1 minute and 52 seconds. The new intranet has a success rate of 88% and users require only 54 seconds on average to perform the same tasks. In other words, users can perform more than twice as many tasks per hour with the new design. This improvement is somewhat more than the average across our intranet usability metrics benchmarks, but then L.L.Bean does have an award-winning intranet.

I am Director of Business Development and Marketing at Rightpoint, the country's premier SharePoint knowledge repository with end to end solutions around everything SharePoint. You can reach me at jwillinger@rightpoint.com