When you improve the user experience in SharePoint development projects, you’re providing a better product, and that tends to increase your return on investment (ROI) across the board.
From an economic standpoint, it makes sense to invest in user research and create a great user experience (UX) before you begin work on visual design, because this research allows you to anticipate issues that would otherwise come up during development, when they are much more expensive to fix.
Research indicates that unforeseen usability problems make up the top four reasons why software development projects go over budget. While UX research takes time and money, you’re able to mitigate some of the issues that would occur later during design and development, and also catch some of the problems that would show up post-release.
When you try to design in a vacuum, however, you’re making decisions based on the assumption that everyone thinks like you do and has the same goals. As a result, you’ll probably end up doing maintenance to fix elements that aren’t actually broken but appear broken due to usability issues or disconnect between users’ mental models and the system interface.
UX research also reduces the chance of releasing a SharePoint development project that users perceive as half-baked. Perhaps your interface doesn’t provide sufficient contrast between foreground and background, or your navigation isn’t usable on an iPad, which is how your entire sales force accesses the solution. When those UX problems show up in the release, it gives users the impression that you spent very little time developing it.
Here are three tips for improving the user experience and increasing the ROI on your SharePoint development projects:
- Know what problems you’re solving: Developers often waste time solving problems that don’t exist for users. Think about all the mobile apps on your smartphone that you only use for one specific task because the rest of the features aren’t useful. A software feature is just a solution to a problem, and when users don’t have that problem, the feature is useless. When people are creating specifications for SharePoint development, the documentation and user scenarios need to do a good job of identifying the problem that must be solved.
- Encourage developers to ask questions: People should feel free to question the design process and see user profiles and scenarios as guiding principles instead of gospel. If the information doesn’t seem to fit, you can’t just execute the project and hope it works — that’s ultimately more expensive than stopping to conduct more research and ask more questions.
- Help developers understand the overall design process: By giving people a broader perspective on a development project and everything that goes into it, they have a better understanding of where their responsibilities and deliverables fit in the larger picture. People should understand the project at a macro level and what those working alongside them are doing. That way, they don’t waste time on tasks that fall into someone else’s wheelhouse or don’t contribute to the overall project success.
When your organization has a strong UX design process, everyone is responsible for creating a great user experience, from sales through research, design, development and quality assurance testing. All these aspects are part of the user experience design process, and everyone needs to see his or her role as part of that larger whole.
Learn more about improving ROI on SharePoint development by contacting Portal Solutions.
Contributor: Adam Krueger, Creative Director at Portal Solutions
