One of the things that SharePoint is being used increasingly for is Web Content Management (WCM). More and more enterprises who are adopting SharePoint as an enterprise platform also want to make use of it for their internet sites. It has great features that make it a very comfortable choice for this purpose. However, using SharePoint as a WCM poses a not so obvious challenge - trying to design a website which has a visually appealing UI can sometimes be a chore due to how the HTML that is emitted by SharePoint and how hard it can be to control. It becomes very difficult sometimes to generate HTML which follows web standards causing problems with cross-browser compatibility of the sites (although, with SharePoint 2010 things are a lot better than with MOSS 2007).
Our customers are very particular about the UI design of their websites (some of them have paid enormous amount of money to get it designed by the best design firms in the world, others have used our in-house design teams which are as good). When this design is converted to HTML and broken down to be part of SharePoint themes and templates, it requires special expertise to ensure that the final output is a perfect match to the initial design (pixel-to-pixel). We have this expertise and we have the process to ensure that this is achieved regardless of the complexity of the website UI design.
About the process
While UI design and application prototyping is offered as a separate service area by Nagarro, it is also used extensively internally by our SharePoint and other project teams. During the phase when our business analysis team works with the customer for finalizing requirements and UI design, they work hand-in-hand with our UI design team and our SharePoint architecture group to validate all design decisions.
The way this is carried out is that all design artifacts (photoshop files, images, etc.) are handed over to the UI design team to convert into standards-compliant HTML. This is then handed over to the SharePoint architecture team for evaluation. During the evaluation if the architecture team feels that there are UI constructs present which may cause trouble to develop, they quickly develop a prototype (webpart, template, etc.) to try and replicate the said UI constructs. This way we can validate all UI design requirements ahead of time and ensure that we are able to deliver the design that our customers need.
Creating a high-fidelity corporate website for a leader in prestige beauty
One of our customers is a market leader in the prestige beauty business. One of the core value propositions of the customer deals with the concept of providing a sense of high-touch to everyone who interacts with them. We were asked to ensure that this value is reflected as part of the corporate website that we were building using SharePoint for this customer.
The customer contracted a very high-end design firm to come up with the UI design of their website. We worked with the design firm to provide validations on technical feasibility, usability, and UI design standards to come up with a design which we could develop on SharePoint in a pixel-perfect manner. We validated the design by creating actual prototypes on SharePoint during the UI design activity.
The project for creating the website entailed a lot more than implementing great UI design - we had to develop custom content publishing workflows, a regional site variation framework, website analytics and ROI, and provide multi-lingual support for the content, to name a few other requirements. We worked with the customer to create end-user training programs that are used to impart learning for the site and content administrators.
While the UI design part was not the biggest effort for this website project, it was the most critical - it was the part that dictated the success and failure outcome for our customer - it was the end-customer facing part. It was critical to get it right.