lucky you...if there ever was a treasure trove of opportunities to uncover usability issues with an enterprise application, sharepoint is it!
Keep in mind that sharepoint is a type of content management system, where the "ownership" is distributed down to the users of the site usually. I have found that rarely is proper IA development applied here, for fear or taking away the freedom of the users to do what they want. As a result, a large problem with the usability that people experience is not sharepoint's fault, but a problem with its implementation. That said, if you wanted to test the out of the box usability of sharepoint, you could design a series of scenarios (e.g. create a list, change the list name, assign a new user to the web site etc...) and you would find that there are a lot of things that are usability challenges. The question would be, what can you do about them? It would be like identifying there were problems with the MS Word interface. However, that said, you could use that information to provide extra help guides for your users, or isolate certain users from having to execute tasks that might be too confusing for them etc... To test the implementation of the site, use the same approaches that one would for any website/application. Make sure that the structure of the information and the terminology used are tested to make sense the user community in question. Good luck with it! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=44420 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
