This is a screenshot of opening a calendar event in the modal. As you can see, the “export event” command is in a tab called “Custom Commands.”
The question I have for Microsoft is, why would anyone be compelled to use a tab with such a title?
I attempted to export to Excel from a list in Safari on my Mac (and I assume the same is true on Safari for Windows), but even though the button itself is active, it does not actually work. The error message after clicking the ribbon button is also not very helpful either.
What I find odd is that “Connect to Outlook” and “Sync to SharePoint Workspace” are correctly rendered inactive. The button should be made inactive, and the error message could use an update as well.
HT: Joel Olsen also noticed this in his recent post on browser compatibility.
I get an error message in the create site dialog, and I go to copy the correlation ID. All seemed well until I couldn’t copy it due to the use of Silverlight in the dialog. Microsoft really needs to ask themselves: “Will the addition of Silverlight really add something, or will it just be a silly animation I get out of it?”
Let’s hope all these rumors of moving to HTML5 after this recent version of Silverlight will come true.
In the 2010 release of SharePoint, Microsoft has added a text hint to the search box. As has been already been discussed elsewhere, this is a bad idea to begin with; but for the sake of this post, let’s stick with it for now.
By default, this search box is a contextualized search in the current site, list, or library. In this case, the “Search this site” hint makes sense as seen below. (Although if you go into a list, the text hint remains yet it doesn’t search anything other than the current list/library.)
SharePoint does provide a setting to change the behavior of this search box in regards to its scope in the site collection settings (my talented friend Michal Pisarek has outlined this setting). What if I change the scope to a target results page and include a search center? Interestingly, this changes the scope from a contextualized one in the site or list, and it now includes all sites in the scope. OK then, we would expect the text hint to change right?
The text hint obviously didn’t change, and now it is very misleading to a user. Thankfully, this can be mitigated by choosing to show the scopes drop down in the search settings, and sure enough you can see that even in a subsite the default scope is everything in the collection. Strangely enough, the text hint now goes away.
Solution: The text hint needs to go. I would wager that if I tested this in usability testing, 9/10 times the assumption would be that, without the text hint, that the default scope would be all content. That is after all how the vast majority of public sites work. I would like to see SharePoint do something different with this default search box in the next version. There is some serious room for improvement on presentation and behavior.
Richard Franzen points out that in the Enterprise Wiki, the “Text Layouts” command is disabled in the ribbon, and it leads many people like Richard to conclude it might be a permissions issues. In reality, this control doesn’t apply to enterprise wikis because it uses the publishing model.
This is confusing for a couple of reasons. First, the wiki uses text layouts in the ribbon to adjust how the content area is laid out, and secondly the control should not show in the ribbon if it is not pertinent to the current content management task. Isn’t the whole point of the ribbon to be context sensitive?
Thanks to Raymond Mitchell for sharing this observation.
Another navigation issue in SharePoint 2010 that I was hoping would be fixed is the issue of pagination in lists or libraries. Here is what it looks like at the bottom of one of these lists or libraries when we’ve gone past the limit set in the view.
There are few things missing in this interface.
Solution: All three of the above issues need to be addressed, and it would be helpful to give a larger typographical and possibly graphical emphasis. This navigation is essential, and it should be highlighted accordingly. Check an example of a pagination design pattern, and Smashing Magazine has a lot of other good examples.
The talented Tristan Watkins points out an interaction that I also thought was very puzzling as well, and it revolves around how the status is updated in a My Site. To update your status simply focus on the speech bubble, and it turns into an editable field. After erasing your old status and replacing it with a new status it can be completed by hitting return on your keyboard or changing focus off of the speech bubble.
So what’s the issue? There are two things, but the first one is the really big issue. Where have you ever seen any kind of status update interface anywhere that updated when you remove focus from the field? If you’ve ever seen one besides this interface than please let me know, because I have not. What if I want to paste a URL and to do so I remove focus to go and copy it? Well, too late your status is already updated.
The second issue is that when you highlight your previous status to update with a new status the old one remains? I ask you again: have you ever seen that before? Text hints in forms fields have been proven problematic already, but MSFT decided to include the old status as a text hint.
Solution: Add in the ability for a user to explicitly update your status with some sort of additional interaction besides simply losing focus (a button perhaps). Also, when giving focus to the speech bubble to update a status remove the old status update and leave a blank field. What I really think should be done for the latter issue is that the speech bubble shouldn’t even show your last update, but this would require a complete rethinking of the interface.
Tristian Watkins blogs at www.tristanwatkins.com and on Twitter @tristanwatkins.
I’m working on the new site for my company, and while configuring it and setting some custom welcome pages (the setting that changes which page you’re directed to first in a site without explicitly setting a page in the URL) I wondered if I was able to set a welcome page on a page that didn’t have a published version. Turns out you can, and when I went back in anonymously to try and hit the site I got a wonderful default error message.
Solution: After thinking about this there are two solutions. One is that when you browse for a page to set it the view could exclude any pages without at least one major version and if approval is turned on then approved as well. The other solution is to show them in the picker, but when you select one that doesn’t meet the previous criteria SharePoint won’t allow you to save the setting. Both aren’t the absolute best, but the latter I think would cause less confusion. I think there would be more confusion to browse for a page and have it not seen unless some kind of explanatory message was presented.
Marcy Kellar has posted a fantastic article on the usability issues present in My Sites in SharePoint 2010. She reviews many issues particularly regarding navigation in the out-of-the-box experience. It’s a shame that there are so many issues in the current incarnation, especially when you consider this is version two of this offering. Social interaction is hard enough to sell in the enterprise that it doesn’t need to be made harder with a bad interface.
I will be working with her on a parts two and three so watch out on her blog for those.
Marcy writes at www.thesharepointmuse.com and is on Twitter @marcykellar.
I guess SharePoint only wanted to tell me there were no suggested colleagues.
About Unexpected Error
