Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away… I used to work for one of the giant pizza chains. As a learning professional, I took it upon myself to understand what it was like to work in a pizza store. You don’t have to be in a store for too long before a mistake happens. Wrong toppings, giant bubbles, or just plain ugly pizzas. Most operators had enough sense not to send these pizzas to the customer and would make a new pizza, but instead of wasting $3 in food cost and throwing out the mistake, these pizzas would become “crew pies” and would often sit boxed on top of the oven until someone had time for a break and would grab a slice or two.

Well, on one store trip, I noticed a sign on the wall that said “no crew pies.” My first reaction was that the store operator was sending a message about mistakes, and not making them, but the company had all sorts of slogans and signs about making quality product and “no crew pies” was not one of them, so I had to ask.

Turns out the operator had much different reasons, and it wasn’t a slogan; it was a rule. He explained to me that he was in a war for good employees with the other restaurants in town. It was hard to find and keep people, and he felt that it sent the wrong message to serve the people that worked for him the worst product his store turned out. Besides, if his team thought that bad pizza was good enough for them, how far of a stretch is it for them to expect his customers to live with bad pizza?

Fast forward to today. I am in the privileged position of consulting with some of the world’s largest companies. Companies that are selling customers some of the most advanced systems, services, and technology available. However, all too often the internal sites these companies use to support their own employees are the internet equivalent of “crew pies.” Barely branded and poorly organized. This is especially true when it comes to SharePoint™ sites.

It’s not enough to just have the information out there. The person has to first want to use the site (acceptance) and then be able to use the site (usability). Newsflash: The default SharePoint™ page templates are not attractive and are not intuitively usable. Even if you are lucky enough to have an IT department that branded the default templates, it most likely is still not good enough. Chances are if you already have an existing SharePoint™ implementation, you’ve seen these default templates in action, as have your users. They have already formed a negative impression of what SharePoint™ is and have little or no vision of what its potential is.

I’m not suggesting that all of your internal sites become graphical Flash sites with splash pages, but I am saying that at a cursory glance, your internal sites need to:

  1. Not look like SharePoint™ default templates
  2. Reflect the importance of the people, business line, product or service it is intended to support

In SharePoint™ development circles, efforts towards user acceptance are often referred to as branding, but it’s more than that; it’s part of the overall design. The goal of design should be a positive or at least transparent user experience. There are two components of user experience, acceptance and usability. Acceptance is typically the result of good positioning and good visual design whereas usability stems from information design.

If we go back to our “crew pie” example, mistake pizzas may in fact taste good, but the user experience is disrupted because admittedly user acceptance is compromised: the pizza is ugly or its usability is challenged—it has the wrong stuff. That’s not to say the crew won’t eat it, but they may not like it.

The intangible message here is that our internal sites and systems set the tone for what our employees deliver to our customers or users, and it’s imperative that our customer’s user experience be flawless. Besides, in a war for talent, our valued employees deserve better than a “crew pie.”

In my next blog post, we’ll dive more into the user acceptance side of the equation and explore some strategies for designing and validating user acceptance as part of a branding, positioning, or graphic design effort.