My friend Michal Pisarek points out a potential issue with the common “cog” iconography for settings that appears incredibly close both in IE and SharePoint 2013.
I think the bigger issue is removing the well-established “site actions” paradigm. I like that MSFT isn’t afraid to make bold changes, but they aren’t always positive as we see here and the widely criticized Windows 8.
I wonder when they were sitting around designing this they asked themselves, “what is the most important activity in document library?” If they did, they apparently thought that sharing was because it’s a mess to get to the more important activities (viewing/editing properties, deleting, etc.). Just looking at this makes my head hurt.
I was asked recently if you can create alerts on list views, which is a reasonable question. I started investigating and found out you must have a where clause (SharePoint calls it a “filter”) for the option to show up in the alert UI.
The question is: Why? I can’t in my mind figure out why this is.
I’ve picked on the manage content and structure tool before, so why not do it again? I was working with someone who was confused on why the tool seemed to indicate in the tree view navigation that there was content underneath it, but when the clicked the plus sign there was nothing. That’s a good question!
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.
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