In the context of an internal SharePoint solution I think that branding, in any more detail than basic colour and logo could be considered as a waste of investment.
I question whether an organisation can justify the investment required for awesome branding based upon the following questions:
- Does it help the organisation move towards its vision?
- What is the ROI of the branding work?
- Does the branding deliver clear and measurable business value?
- Does branding support and encourage user adoption?
Discuss….
Branding in SharePoint delivers a couple of functions. It also depends on the use case of SharePoint Server. I think it started from collaboration and through the massive publishing functions SharePoint 2013 has become an internal communication tool too.
Branding helps organizations the raise the brand awareness of the employees and to identify more with the organization. I talk a lot to internal communications departments and they love to have their intranets branded.
It’s true that we don’t brand word but we brand word template for internal and external communication. Branding means not to style or redesign the overall behavior of SharePoint but how to present the content.
Branding to me is a great option for organizations and a great risk too. Branding made by the wrong people can be risky.
- Don’t expect to get a branding for your intranet done better by someone that doesn’t know SharePoint
Then you better stay with logo, colors and fonts. Maybe background images.
(If seen a lot fixed with brandings, that shrinks the ribbon or doesn’t meet the intention of the site) - Don’t think to be smarter than Microsoft and change the core usability concepts.
(I think Microsoft invests a lot in usability testing) - Think about to define color codes for the purpose and not strictly force every page to look the same.
(This one comes more from architecture – define a color code system for projects, intranet, …)
From the ROI perspective. Most companies currently have intranet mostly based on old school pure web content management systems. At least SharePoint should look better then your old intranet. It’s hard to argue with the management we removed your intranet but instead you have SharePoint. (I hope you know what I mean).
Business value. Well let’s pick one example. The rich text editor is technically good but needs adoptions to the content. For example user can read content better if the line height is not 100% but between 125% and 150%. This is one of the things that improves the usability of wikis, blogs, etc and is also part of branding to me.
Do branding supports and encourage user adoptions. There are many things you can do to help the user to produce content for the intranet.
Sorry for my wild thoughts but there are so many different aspects of branding that needs to be considered.Â
Thanks Mark, interesting thoughts, whats the book called, sounds like something else I need to put on my ever increasing virtual bookshelf!
I think you hit the nail on the head that it is a case of diminishing returns, once you get past a base level of branding… An interesting thought about focusing detailed branding/UX effort in discreet places. I wonder if anyone has stats as to the sustainable increase or not in value in those areas?
There are definitely diminishing returns once you get into really sculpting the way sharepoint looks.
I enjoyed the Lean Startup and am wary of vanity metrics, and have today been reading about Sam Walton (of Walmart fame) – he was legendary in his dislike of spending effort on ANYTHING that didn’t directly make a difference to the customer, so on one hand he’d be in favour of the bare bones. On the other hand he was the master of merchandising so perhaps he would have picked one or two key aspects of sharepoint and made them stand out.
Great topic by the way, am enjoying the comments.
Thanks Mark.
I think it’s a matter of level’s..
As Scott said above (Scott’s comments):
“..A basic, custom-branded master page to conform to an organization’s branding guidelines can take as little as a few hours and the outcome can be drastic and tremendously successful….”Â
And I agree that it makes sense as part of a wider set of Change Management and User Adoption activities and initiatives, but I’ve seen organisations focus immense amount of time creating ‘Metro Style’ UX for their SharePoint 2010 platform and then skimp on effort for change management, user adoption and governance. To my mind that’s crazy!
Yes we are human, but we need to be careful in the SharePoint world about ‘vanity metrics’ (See book ‘The Lean Startup’), these are metrics or measures that look good but are actually meaningless. Having an awesome looking SharePoint collaboration site that has lots of hits to the home page is meaningless if the rest of the site is hardly looked at all, or if there is no value on the home page.
As with a lot of what I consult, we should ask ourselves the question “What difference will it make” to every aspect of our SharePoint project, and if it isn’t substantial and positive then we should question the validity of that action.
All food for thought and there is no 1 right answer…
Does branding help the org move towards its vision? – it doesn’t hurt.
ROI of the branding work? – is this about SharePoint being hard work to brand? Agreed! But seriously, if the users are unhappy with the fugly standard look then they are going to resist using it. If that happens then the ROI of your project is at risk. Rationally I’d agree that a business tool does not need to look good to function well. But we are human, we love art and beauty, and drive pretty rather than functional cars.
Clear and measurable business value? Not easy to measure. But similar to your ROI question.
Support and encourage user adoption? Yes, to the extent the users believe in the brand!
