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!
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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=44420
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