driving sharepoint end-user adoption: usability and performance

1 COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL – DO NOT DISTRIBUTE #Dynatrace

Wendy Neal, SharePoint Consultant, McGladrey

Andreas Grabner, Performance Advocate, Dynatrace

Thursday, March 26

Driving SharePoint End-User Adoption: Usability and Performance


SharePoint Site Usability and User Adoption TipsWendy Neal


Wendy NealSenior SharePoint Consultant, McGladrey

@SharePointWendy

http://wendy-neal.com

Contributing Author:

• CMSWire

• ITUnity


• Basic Website Usability Concepts

• The Challenges of User Adoption

• Overcoming the Challenges

• Key Points to Remember

Outline


Basic Website Usability Concepts


• According to Steve Krug, websites should be:

• Self-evident

• Obvious

• Self-explanatory

Rule #1: Don’t Make Me Think

If you remember

nothing else about

usability, remember

this rule!


• Navigation by browsing

• Primary navigation

• Secondary navigation

• Utilities links

• Navigation by Searching

Types of Navigation


SharePoint 2013 Navigation Areas

SearchGlobal Navigation

Quick

Launch

Utilities Menu

Page Title


• Concise and consistent primary navigation

• Identical no matter where you are

• Max 9 links

• Secondary links relative to where you’re at

• Active links highlighted

• Page titles match link names

• Breadcrumbs

Navigation Best Practices


• Attract attention

• Good balance of images and text

• Keep content succinct and uncluttered

• Place important content “above the fold”

Home Page Design


• Typical minimum screen size is 1024 x 768

• Test your site on different screen resolutions

• You want to avoid left/right scrolling at all costs!

• The “fold” will be in different places depending on screen resolution

Design for Different Screen Sizes


Hyperlink Etiquette

Are you linking to…NewWindow

Same Window

A site other than yours?

Someplace within your site?

• To open in a new window or not, that is the question…


Challenges of User Adoption


• Usability best practices have likely not been followed

• Lack of content and information architecture planning

Site is hard to use or navigate


Users don’t understand the purpose of the site

• Change management plan has not been created

• Users feel like they don’t have any say or importance


• Lack of communication or change management plan

• Lack of evangelism or excitement

Users don’t know about your site


Users can’t find what they’re looking for

• Search not properly configured/ maintained

• Information architecture and/or navigation not set up correctly


• No one “owns” the content

• Not enough time, resources to keep content fresh

Content isn’t kept up to date


Site is slow

• Servers don’t have enough resources

• Inadequate network bandwidth

• Custom code is not optimized

• Too many web parts on the page

• Bad JavaScript


Overcoming the Challenges


• User-friendly SharePoint sites must be designed with good usability principles in mind

• Therefore, we must teach our site owners:

• Basic usability concepts

• What they’re responsibilities are

• How to be webmasters of their sites

Provide training to site owners


• Designing the Site/Navigation

• Setting up the information architecture

• Permissions management

• User Analytics

• Content facilitation

• Assisting users with issues

Example Responsibilities of a Site Owner


Don’t forget the end users

• Create a change management plan

• Get end users involved early

• Explain how it will make their job easier (and make sure that it does!)

• Provide end user training


Plan your Information Architecture

• Don’t use folders!

• Utilize metadata, site columns, and content types, and views

• Don’t just dump all the files on your shared drive into SharePoint!


• Lunch and learns

• Contests

• Set up user alerts

• Bulletin boards

Promote Your Site


• Announcements

• Did You Know?

• What’s New?

• Quote of the Week

• Team Member Spotlight

Frequent Updates to Content


• Lead by example

• Use SharePoint for your own processes, collaboration and document sharing

Eat Your Own Dog Food


• Observe your users’ frustrations and pain points

• Be proactive by using a tool to monitor performance and user satisfaction

Watch your users


Key Points to Remember


Key Points

• SharePoint sites have the capability of being user-friendly, IF they are designed properly

• Organizations need to provide SharePoint training as well as teach site owners how to be “webmasters” of their sites

• And lastly…


Anything that confuses or frustrates users WILL affect user adoption

• Sites that have poor usability

• Sites without a clear purpose

• Sites that are slow

This includes:


SharePoint Performance Health: Checks Beyond CPU and MemoryAndreas Grabner, Performance Advocate, Dynatrace


Andreas GrabnerDynatrace Developer Advocate

@grabnerandi

http://blog.dynatrace.com


SharePoint Health Checks

#1: End User Health: Happy or Frustrated? Desktop or Mobile?

#3: System Health: CPU, Memory, Process Distribution, …

#2: Site Health: Any Errors? Any Performance Issues?

#4: IIS Health: Bandwidth? Threads? HTTP 4xx, 5xx?

#5: AppPool Health: Memory, CPU, GC, Exceptions, Logs …

#6: SQL & Service Health: # Roundtrips, Data Amount, CPU, Memory, I/O

#7: Web Parts: 3rd Party & Custom. Bad Coding and Bad Deployments lead to crashes


Check #1: End User Health

#1: Geo Location: Where from is SharePoint Accessed? Which

Offices? Which Remote Locations?

#2: User Environment: Is everyone using IE? How many use Mobile

Devices? Bandwidth Issues?

#3: Errors: Bad URLs? Bad JavaScript? Missing files?


Check #2: Site Health#1: Load: Which sites are used?

#2: Failures: Any functional issues?

#3: Performance: Meeting our SLAs?

#4: Infrastructure: Servers Healthy?

#5: End User Index: Happy users?


Check #3: System Host Health

#1: CPU & Memory: Background Jobs Running? What else is

consuming it?

#3: Process Check: Which processes are consuming these resources? Need to

RE-DEPLOY processes?

#2: I/O: Too much logging? Serving too many static files?

Data Sync Jobs?


Check #4: IIS Health#1: Threads: Enough IIS Worker Threads?

Are threads waiting or doing work?

#2: Throughput: Enough Bandwidth available? Better Cache Settings?

#3: Page Size: Bloated pages? Cache Settings? CDN?


Check #5: AppPool Health

#1: Memory: Indication of bad Memory Access or Leaks?

#2: Garbage Collection: Impact on Performance?

#3: Worker Threads: Proper Sizing Configuration?


Check #6: SQL & Service Health

#2: Connectivity Issues

#1: Excessive SQL Roundtrips


Check #7: Web Parts#1: Performance: How long

does it take to render?

#2: Deployment: Missing any Dependencies?

#3: Bad Coding: 211 SQL Calls from a single Web Part


3 Steps to Use Dynatrace SharePoint FastPack

#1: Registerbit.ly/dtsharepointfastpack

#2: Installbit.ly/dttutorials

#3: Analyzebit.ly/sharepurepath

http://bit.ly/dtsharepointfastpack

http://bit.ly/dttutorials

http://bit.ly/sharepurepath


Key Points to Take Home

#1: End User Health: Happy or Frustrated? Desktop or Mobile?

#3: System Health: CPU, Memory, Process Distribution, …

#2: Site Health: Any Errors? Any Performance Issues?

#4: IIS Health: Bandwidth? Threads? HTTP 4xx, 5xx?

#5: AppPool Health: Memory, CPU, GC, Exceptions, Logs …

#6: SQL & Service Health: # Roundtrips, Data Amount, CPU, Memory, I/O

#7: Web Parts: 3rd Party & Custom. Bad Coding and Bad Deployments lead to crashes


Questions and/or Demo

Get Tools: bit.ly/dttrial

YouTube Tutorial: youtu.be/ImivHaDq0OA

Contact Me: [email protected]

Follow Me: @grabnerandi

Read More: blog.dynatrace.com

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