Microsoft SharePoint offers a lot of useful functionality, but let’s be honest – the user experience is far from perfect. The SharePoint user interface is not as consistent or cohesive as many would expect for such an important product. Often that leaves organizations and their technical consultants having to build a layer on top of the standard SharePoint UI to facilitate navigation and interaction with content within the application.
If you’re considering using SharePoint but are concerned about its user experience capabilities, read on to learn more about these challenges before you make your decision.
Why Is the SharePoint UX Sometimes Disappointing?
SharePoint is a complex application, and is the result of multiple teams at Microsoft working hard to create the application. While we don’t know for sure, this approach most likely has led to disconnects between building different parts of the platform.
To some extent, disappointment with the SharePoint UX is inevitable. Microsoft has developed a platform that is used by millions of people with very diverse needs. Meaning many of the use cases Microsoft supports within SharePoint will be very generic. For example, SharePoint’s record management system is fairly bare bones, as it is impossible for Microsoft to predict all the possible use cases required by its customers. This leaves most customers with the difficult decision of whether to accept and work with the out of the box experience or augment the platform, which is often a costly affair.
Do the Pitfalls Outweigh the Benefits?
Yes, there are key drawbacks to SharePoint, but it is still an exciting platform for collaboration,and the billions of dollars in license sales is a testament to the fact that many organizations still see a tremendous benefit despite some of the frustrations.
Most organizations understand that attempting to build an application like SharePoint from the ground up is not economically feasible and not even a good idea even if the money was there. SharePoint has now six major versions of trial and error, and the core things SharePoint does well, such as document collaboration, it does very well.
How to Improve the SharePoint UX
Because the out-of-the-box functionality of the SharePoint UI is at times very basic, most businesses have to dedicate resources to custom development, thereby creating the functionality they need.
You know your own use case better than anyone else, so you can create a user interface that works best for your organization. You can also work with a consulting organization to design and implement the right user interface for you. Make sure the organization you choose is dedicated to understanding the whole corpus of business and user needs in order to ensure that your investment will be fruitful.
That said, it’s important to be selective about how you augment SharePoint, as creating a custom UI and adding your own functionality can be expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, any customization of SharePoint should be driven by an underlying business and/or user need and not simply by ideas about what features would be nice to have. Balancing the right amount of out of the box and custom functionality can result in a solution that is highly utilized and critical to your business success.
