I hate SharePoint (and so do you) – Part 2

Last week I wrote about a non-profit organization I did some content management work with, and what the employees chose to do when presented with two content management toolsets – SharePoint, and a file server. The file server was heavily adopted (or more correctly, continued to be used) while SharePoint usage tailed off. As soon as IT stopped their ongoing program of educating, cajoling and lambasting Sharepoint fell out of employees “field of view.”

The non-profit in question is by no means staffed by a bunch of slackers who don’t care about their work or their role in society. In fact they pride themselves on the level of service they provide to their clients – They build award-winning permanent housing specifically geared for adults with mental illness. They offer an incredible breath of services, from homeless outreach to on-the-job “roadside assistance.” Every aspect of the non-profit lines up behind the mission of being a LEADER in service and commitment to these adults who really have nowhere else to turn. The counselors, staff and administration work tirelessly to raise funds, acquire new accommodation, rebuild or renovate it, and chip away at the homeless problem.



But they’re human, and maintaining a nice clean shiny content management system is neither their mission nor their priority. In retrospect we should never have implemented a content management system that makes yet more demands of them. Our catch-phrase before implementing the solution (and with apologies to Winston Churchill for poor paraphrasing) should have been:



Ask not what you can do for your content management system;
Rather ask what your content management system can do for you.



Can it just – take care of stuff? Can it do the paperwork, or some of the paperwork processes, for me? Can it do it no matter which facility I’m in? Can it not require me to check in, check out, monitor versions, conflict resolve, upload, download each document? EVERY TIME?? Can it not ask me to go to some portal, log in, navigate through a bizarre sequence of screens and commands, throw hissy-fits and non-communicative messages at me, before I can share a status report with the team? Can it just make sure I have the latest policy manual, rather than asking me to do the checking, every time? Can it not lock me out at eleven o’ clock at night when I’ve got a crisis at one of the housing facilities and the county decides it wants to see some documentation on our permit variances?



It’s easy to say “I hate SharePoint” or “SharePoint sucks.” To be balanced, SharePoint is a very good product. USABILITY sucks, but the underpinnings are solid. What’s more interesting to me is where we as humans go when we encounter these tools that don’t meet our needs but they’ve been mandated by on-high with some pretty big expectations of “success.” I think we all have a built-in BS meter, but it takes a while to calibrate it for new technology. We feel encouraged, we feel engaged. We feel confident that this will solve that niggling communication/collaboration/file sharing/versioning/insert favorite problem here problem we’ve had for a while. We adopt the tool, whole-heartedly, We run into problems using it. It makes no sense. We feel confused. Shades of self-doubt creep in. Why can’t I figure this out? Am I incompetent? Stupid? Worse, am I the ONLY one having problems with this application? Will I be found to be lacking before my peers; reprimanded, punished?
But eventually that BS meter says “enough” and we get mad. “It’s not me, it’s the application,” we tell ourselves, and we feel smug for a while, and bitch about it in the lunch room. “SharePoint/DocuShare/ sucks.” There’s this quality of “you made me feel stupid so now I’m retaliating” that unfortunately causes many good applications to get rejected – the good gets tossed out with the bad. We stop using the good product with the bad manners and drift back to those other applications which may not do as much, but they do what they do well, without asking us to read a manual or re-learn how we do a simple process. In the case of this non-profit, nobody has any issues with storing their files out on the file server. By comparison, “File>Save” is way better than the alternative.



Is there a solution that offers the best of both? Effective, supportive applications that are also easy to adopt and use? We at Content Circles think there is. Build better products. Hah! Easier said than done, we know. To be more specific, build products for the users, not for the IT department. I’d like to say we have a fancy name for our style of design, but we couldn’t come up with much beyond “sensible” and “functional.” I’ll write more about the design philosophy in a future post, maybe drop in some references to the Bauhaus mantra of Form Follows Function just to sound artsy and informed. Maybe we WILL have a fancy name for it by then. But in parting I’ll offer a simple example and question. Cell-phones have a keypad, arranged in a grid, with numbers on. Not because the designers can’t think of a more novel or rationalized UI for your cell-phone/camera/MP3 player/contacts library/clock/text-messaging center/game console. It’s there because the primary purpose of a cell-phone UI is to enable you to quickly connect with someone by phone. Now for the question: If your document sharing application was designed to work as seamlessly as your cell-phone, what would it look like?