I have had the opportunity to see a variety of SharePoint deployments and I have found that Information Architecture (IA) is regularly overlooked or short-sighted in many organizations. IA is an emerging discipline and is defined as the art and science of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability. So why do organizations invest very little in creating an IA that is useful to users? Organizations can spend up to a million or more implementing a new website or online collaboration project but an IA can be de-scoped quickly from projects due to the project running over budget or time.
A fully fleshed out IA can have dramatic changes on an organization and an end user’s experience (UX) when it comes to finding information. Take the most commonly referenced example for a completely defined and standardized IA, a library. Now imagine that library without any organization. You walk in looking for one book and there are millions on the shelves. Maybe there is some organization, grouped by hardback and paperbacks then sorted by color of book then sorted by largest to smallest. If you are looking for the smallest red paperback book then this architecture is perfect. Even though these attributes help organize the books, it is not very helpful for normal users. You would rather walk in and go to the non-fiction section where the titles are sorted by author and find books written by Jim Collins because you just read Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies and you want to find more of his books.
So how does SharePoint IA boost end user’s productivity? Let’s take a look at the largest online retailer as an example, Amazon.com. You go to their site and perform a basic search for Jim Collins and find Built to Last as the seventh result returned. Upon selecting the link to view the product details of that book is when Amazon's information architecture comes to life. They provide you with “Best Value” and “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” sections as well as allow customer ratings on items. This helps you find good deals and what other people recommend. Without this you might wonder how good Good to Great or Great by Choice are to read. It is these types of features that help Amazon.com remain the number one online retailer. Not to mention the robust metadata that allows customers to find items by Department, New Release, Format, Author, Series, Language, International Shipping, Prime Eligible, Promotions, Average Customer Rating, Condition, and Availability. This may seem like a lot of information to add to every product but it satisfies just about every option a user might use to find a product which enhances the end user’s experience.
I know, this is a great example but you aren't Amazon.com. So how does this translate to you and your organization’s SharePoint environment? Building out an Information Architecture with the end user in mind is just part of the process. SharePoint 2010 has many underutilized functions that can be configured to boost end users productivity and provide Amazon-like experiences.
• Robust user centric IA
• Content Rating
• My Task, Assigned to Me & Personal Views
• Detailed Alerts, Notifications & RSS feeds
• Saved Search Alerts
• Search Scopes
• MySite Newsfeed to track colleagues
These out-of-the-box (OOB) SharePoint functions can have a dramatic impact on an end user’s experience and boost their productivity. This is just the introduction to a series of blogs where I will explain in detail how to configure some underutilized functions. No longer will you have to go on fruitless searches looking for information or wait for others to tell you about it. Productivity begins with a user-centric IA which leads to huge productivity gains and an ROI that pays back more than the amount of time spent creating a comprehensive information architecture. Stay tuned as I will blog about the technical details on how to configure SharePoint for each of these functions. No special equipment needed; just extraordinary performance to be gained.