All right, to start out with I have to admit that although my day-to-day career is very much in the applied science software development area, my background in my undergrad work is in Math – totally a pure science.  This means that I tend to think in more of a pure model approach as opposed to inherently accepting applied models.  This has its pluses and minuses at times, but we all work with what we have.

I was thinking recently “Why the success of SharePoint in the enterprise?”.   Of course all the standard arguments of Enterprise 2.0, collaborative environments, information sharing surfaced as an answer.  But as I am delving into the software development aspects of SharePoint 2010 and starting to see a little deeper into the platform, I’m starting to realize a more basic reason.

In reality, I think one of the major contributing factors to the success of SharePoint in the enterprise as a platform has to do with how poor the user interface paradigm of a file system really is.    Now this is taking a lot of reflection, because I trace my beginnings back to Fortran 4 and being a so-called BSD Unix hacker in the 80’s and early 90’s.  So in other words, directories and files are ingrained pretty deeply in my “taken for granted” psyche.  When you think about it, from a user’s perspective a filing system such as the one they use or have used in the past for paper looks like this:

Note the external enclosure with clean lines, the drawers, the ability to place decorations on top of it to facilitate good feng shui.  To access information in a filing cabinet, you need to physically approach it, pull out a drawer, and then start to look for the particular document you desire.  95% of all filing cabinets have folders organized in an alphabetical order, so you know what to expect.  Some of the other 5% and later filing systems would organize cabinets or sections of cabinets into different purposes, like “day to day” or “long term”. 

Now a “filing system” on a computer looks and acts much differently than the above.  It looks like this:

I think after the 4998765555th time of helping someone not very computer literate find the document they were working on and saved but didn’t know where they saved it to and couldn’t quite get the picture that they might have saved it so someplace different than “My Documents” it started to dawn on me that this whole “file system” paradigm really wasn’t a very good one at all.   When you think about it a file system on a computer is the simplest way that “developers” could organize a pointer in memory to a location – by using a string.  The forward slashes in a string are a “developer’s” organizational construct, not an intuitive one.

This relates in my mind to some different books I’ve read on the topic of HCI or Human-Computer Interaction and the interrelated field of “UX”.   A couple of the first books I read were “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum” and “About Face” by Alan Cooper, which I purchased shortly after being at an architecture conference and having lunch with Alan and about 6 other known tech industry leaders with Alan being on a soapbox about how developers cannot design user interaction because they think differently than end users.   Alan’s known as the “Father of Visual Basic” as he designed the first UI interface for Basic that he sold to Microsoft.

So to bring these thoughts and this discussion full circle, I think one of the successes of SharePoint in the enterprise has to do with the fact that a large number of information workers in your enterprise environment are not developer types, and to successfully interact with computers they need paradigms that they can relate to.  Most users are familiar enough with the Internet by this point that navigating to a website to procure information is not that foreign at all to them.  So if they can browse to a “HR” website, or a “Finance” website they have a head start on finding their document.  But a “shared drive”?  Not so much.  I think organizing information content through a web interface is a UX paradigm that is slightly better than a file system.    I think your average information worker “gets this” a little better than a file system.   So in my opinion, that is one core fundamental reason that SharePoint has in starting to tie together the enterprise.   Network shared drives that are maintained by departments are starting to be replaced with SharePoint document libraries and team sites.

Now maybe you might say that I have too narrow of a view of the skills of an information worker, and that power users or anyone that has used a computer successfully understands the file system.  I would respond that first my viewpoints on this have been developed over many years of watching and helping people interact with computer systems and software, and second that a UX paradigm that is “natural” or “intuitive” helps UX flow and facilitates interaction much more than any paradigm that presents an obstacle. 

Until next time, happy UX and SharePoint design and development!