Vertical and Scenario Based Template Solutions For SharePoint
Help customer getting inspired, creating beautiful, fast sites and pages that look great on any device or screen by applying the stunning out-of-the-box templates.
SUMMARY
SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform that integrates with Microsoft Office. SharePoint site templates have played an integral role in the SharePoint experience and they are designed to offer the site creators and editors a smoother site-building experience.
By vertical industries or horizontal functions, content and webparts are arranged in preset yet customizable layouts to serve how people utilize team sites or communication sites in their work. Providing customers with the stunning templates close to their scenarios, and richer template features to address their business needs will drive an increase on healthy sites since they can deploy ready-to-go solutions with little setup.
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Building on our existing templates story, our team spearheaded the first wave of vertical-focused and scenario-based site templates to help our customers expand the possibilities with pages, content, and web parts. We also believe that site templates offer an onramp to future monetization opportunities.
MY ROLE
As the first designer of the Verticals & Templates team, I collaborated with our PM and engineer team to define the business strategy, work process, and product path at an early stage.
I designed 7 templates as the first wave of out-of-the-box templates and led a newly joined junior designer on her template works.
I worked with our researcher on multiple methodologies to evaluate the scenario and design solutions, and adjust our product strategy accordingly.
A quick look at the template design
Basically, it means no one visits the site again
The problem
The dashboard from the data team indicates that more than 75% of sites go unhealthy after being created. According to a previous study of site creation funnel, many users abandoned their sites because of:
A lack of training
Long process to build a site
Dislike of the look and feel
Looking at the feedback from our customers, both admins and end-users consider templates as a good starting point to create sites.​ Considering the usage of SharePoint possibly varies across verticals, it’s beneficial to build vertical-specific templates.
The goal
Inspiring customers to create stunning and useful SharePoint sites easily and improve SharePoint site healthy rate by providing vertical-focused and scenario-based templates.
The challenges
The goal of site templates is to give end-users a starting point and inspiration for what’s possible in SharePoint. Automatically adding a set of features based on the scenario you’re creating the site makes the process of creating/building out your site easier and showcases how beautiful our modern experiences can be.
Workflow of applying a template on a Sharepoint site
Because this helps our end users begin on the right foot, it helps ensure that sites have a greater chance of becoming active and ultimately getting healthy usage. Different industry verticals have different healthy site statuses by their nature. And we want to focus on top industries with lower healthy sites.
To reach that goal, we have 3 challenges in front of us:
STAGE 1
How to quickly define the right scenarios in various verticals with just 1 pm, 1 designer, and 1 researcher, when no one has related industry experience?
STAGE 2
How to evaluate our business assumptions and design solutions with an incredibly long shipping process and limited research resources?
CHALLENGE 1
How to quickly define the right scenarios in various verticals with just 1 pm, 1 designer, and 1 researcher, when no one has related industry experience?
What did I do?
Data, desk research and brainstorming
Data analysis was carried out to learn about the user volume for each vertical. After reaching out to the data science team, I helped our researcher build a dashboard on Interana to collect more data on the SharePoint site usage by different verticals. By looking at the dashboard, we got a first expression of the industries that our customers are coming from.
We targeted 4 top verticals in phase one - Healthcare, Retail, Non-profit, and Manufacturing by looking at the usage and healthy rate. To narrow down each vertical's scenarios, each team member did desk research separately and went through brainstorming on FigJam together, to share information and vote for the scenarios that we think have more value to create a template for.
Quick interviews internally and externally
After chatting with different partners from other teams, I found that many talented colleagues at MS have different working experience from various industries, including the ones our team want to deep dive in.
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For example, two of our content writer partners both worked in the retail industry, and a PM in the Redmond team has rich knowledge in the healthcare field. Having quick interviews with them really helped enrich my knowledge of the retail and healthcare industries and made my thought and vision clear.
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I also created quick mocks to get feedback online by talking with several target users that recruited on the UserTesting. Those internal and external interviews help validate my early assumption and build the foundation for the next steps.
CHALLENGE 2
How to evaluate our business assumptions and design solutions with an incredibly long shipping process and limited research resources?
What did I do?
Research method explorations
As SharePoint is a business-facing product, the process to ship a new feature/template is longer than other products. We will need to go through about 5 reviews with different stakeholders and other necessary steps before we roll out the template to the product.
To find out which research methodology is the most efficient and suitable for the templates project, I spent some time on the research method explorations with our researcher.
Apart from the regular methodologies like surveys, online card sorting, moderated usability tests, and unmoderated usability tests, we also tried to leverage the internal customer program resources like MVP 1:1 call, customer connect programs of other teams like Polaris, Industry connect calls, etc.
All the methods have pros and cons but going through all the explorations helped us have a better understanding of what value each program can bring to our project, and it helped with our design process optimization.
Design process optimization
As I mentioned in the last chapter, we have an incredibly long process to ship one feature/template. The vertical-based templates rely on a huge amount of research work and we only got 1 researcher on the team.
So as we were going through the research method explorations, I was also working on optimizing the design process to a customer-driven process with agile design and research.
In the revised process, we will start with some dirty and quick research and design explorations for a new scenario. Then evaluate both the concept and design with one study. Besides, multiple templates will proceed in parallel.
In this way, the resources will be of better use and the templates would be delivered faster. The time that we need for shipping 1 template with the previous process, we could speed up to 2~3 templates with the new process.
Templates design with customer-driven process
With the revised customer-driven process, we quickly narrowed down 7 scenarios. After creating the demo and evaluating them in the usability study, I learned the real use cases and feedback from our customers, and iterate the design in an agile way.
Here I'll pick 2 templates of retail vertical that I designed as an example to brief what I have learned.
Retail management
In the early assumption of the retail management scenario, the template is for information exchanging between store managers, sharing events and documents across regions. But after talking with our customers, I found that this scenario also includes the collaboration between store managers and the corporate which we are missing here.
For corporate, the SharePoint site is mainly for sharing information, facilitating collaboration with store managers and supporting store operation. For store managers, the SharePoint site is not only a place to consume information but also a workstation to complete assigned tasks.
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So I re-prioritized other elements in the template like replacing the event with the News webpart to highlight the importnt news and announcement from the organization, adding a monthly store updates section, highlighting the tools for managers, etc.
Iteration of retail management template
Store collaboration
For the store collaboration scenario, talking to customers helped confirm the early assumption. The SharePoint sites are used for the collaboration between the store manager and store staff within one store such as sharing resources and portals, publishing news/updates, setting tasks & checklists for store operation, etc.
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An important finding is in most cases, store staff don’t have access to laptops. They mainly use cell phones to access information. While designing the template, I must consider the experience on mobile for the frontline retailers. For example, I made the quick links stay on the top so frontline workers will get quick access too. For other elements, they also follow the use cases and priorities to keep consistent across devices.
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In addition, it is also important to have a vision of how Teams and SharePoint sites collaborate to facilitate their work and how SharePoint sites should be embedded in Teams, that will be one big area we will keep exploring in the next steps.
Designing the template across devices
CHALLENGE 3
How to think further and increase the impact beyond just templates?
What did I do?
Optimize the SharePoint core experience to better facilities with the templates experience
Apart from designing more vertical-focused templates, I'm also working on optimizing the SharePoint core experience because that's the foundation of the site templates experience.
The current navigation of the SharePoint site has 2 orientations based on the site type - vertical nav for the team site and horizontal nav for the communication site, and users don’t get the option to set their nav orientation.
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This problem will lead to:
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Some users decide on site type just to get the nav orientation without considering the real scenario. ​
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DSAT as customers feel trapped with the decision they made so users abandon the sites after being created.​
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So I designed the navigation switcher to ​provide the option for users to change the navigation's orientation anytime, It addresses the current problems, gives more freedom to the future templates design and it also aligns with the greater and future vision of having a single base template.​​
Workflow of navigation switcher
Discover more opportunities by integrating with other MS products
SharePoint is a powerful platform that integrates with various 1P and 3P MS product apps like the web parts. We learned from the journey that enterprise customers might not be familiar with other powerful MS products like List and Forms, and new premium offerings like Syntex and Viva, while SMB customers ask for more ready-to-go solutions.
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To fulfill those needs mentioned above, it represents the opportunities for us to drive growth further – making templates as solutions by integrating more MS products in the templates.
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From the templates I designed, I collaborated with the Teams team for the Teams connected templates, integrated MS List and List templates, included site pages and page templates, etc. to ensure our vertical templates are pre-programmed, pre-configured versions of SharePoint sites, which are built to solve the problems and satisfy the requirements of most organizations. They save time, increase efficiency, and decrease costs – all leading to greater productivity and profits.
MS List in the store collaboration template
Design Sprints for the future of the SharePoint
The IA and visual of the current SharePoint haven't been touched for five years, it also sets the limitation of the site template's experience and growth path. We had a five-day design sprint with partners in Redmond to explore more possibilities of the next generation of SharePoint, also for site templates.
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We used the first 2 days to collect inspirations, generate keywords and make mood boards. And in the next 3 days, we deep-dived into individual's theme and come up with the final design.
Team working on the each's moodboard
In my mind, SharePoint should be trustworthy, delightful, and dynamic. Those are my 3 keywords. I really enjoyed the week exploring all the possibilities and being creative without thinking about the tech constraints, I also got really inspired by the invited speakers and the amazing work of other designers. This is only the first step of SharePoint evolution but I'm already excited!
Here's a short video for the final output, enjoy.
The Impact
Our new site templates experience recently shipped in the summer of 2021, with a focus on increasing our healthy collaboration metrics with Teams and our healthy site metrics. There was a ~5% increase in site healthiness overall between 7/31/21 (pre-experiment) and 8/31/21 (experiment rolled out to 100% AB).
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Customers love the templates. We can see there are more than 30,000 sites from our customers that have applied the vertical templates within 3 months. Each template is applied more than 3,000 times every 28 days.
Some customers that have applied vertical templates to their SP sites
For confidentiality reasons, I have omitted the actual values for the metrics.