You might have recognised that the workbench of the SharePoint Framework has a responsive design tester included. In this blog post, I take a look what possibilities we have to properly test the responsiveness and the user experience of a web part.
There are also some pitfalls included if you entirely rely on the integrated too.
Not every one of our users works in marketing or is an expert in storytelling. Storytelling is a skill for the future, but like every skill, it doesn’t come overnight and requires training. I assume, like for many of my customers, have problems to find an appropriate image for the header.
On the other hand, to communicate what is happening around you is beneficial for the rest of the company too. Let me show you a use case why you use default images for events in communication sites first and how to solve this on this kind of site templates.
I know the Feedback and Mobile App buttons are essential for Microsoft, but many of my customers ask me to remove it. There a mainly three reasons for that. The first is the location and loading behaviour of those buttons. It takes a while until those buttons are loaded and catch a lot of attention of the user once they are visible on the page.
The second reason is that the location sticky on the bottom of the page might not be the perfect spot for those buttons. I might be more useful to have them somewhere in the header or suite bar.
In Office 365 there is a great mechanism that allows you to implement a corporate wide branding on the suite bar. The customer can apply their logo and their corporate colors there.
On Monday I thought to myself what if I can make the suite bar less distracting than it is. The solid black and blue combination draw a lot of attention on every load while browsing the various portals and applications.
I customized my suite bar in the admin center to have a white background with the logo in the center of the page. All content pages in Office 365 so the white background, I thought, will seamlessly integrate the ribbon on the page instead of standing out.
It’s easter and let’s hide a small easter egg in SharePoint that will enhance the user experience a little bit.
Microinteractions are small interactions or animations to give a visual feedback to the user. The following graphic explains the base principle of such interaction.
Definition of Microinteractions
A Trigger initiates a microinteractions. The Rules determine what happens, while Feedback lets people know what’s happening. Loops and Modes determine the meta-rules of the microinteraction.
Let me show you a small microinteractions in action by animating the gear icon that can be found in the suite bar of SharePoint.
In fact the source code of the table component of Office UI Fabric looks a bit weird because it is currently built with <div> elements instead of HTML table elements.
The intention behind such div based tables come from the idea to improve the responsive behavior. This idea behind this is almost more than five years old. A time that marked the beginning of responsive web design. Nowadays this pattern is only hardly used because no matter how you build your tables you always face the same problems.
Yesterday i got the confirmation on GitHub that this pattern is subject to be changed.
Time for me to show how this pattern can be transformed to a normal HTML element and to show some advanced techniques to deal with tables in responsive web designs.
See the Pen Office UI Fabric – Table by Stefan Bauer (@StfBauer) on CodePen.14928
When it comes to responsive web design and tables some people might get a panic. In general there is nothing bad about tables. Just treat them right.
This time I like to show how to make list forms responsive. Actually, this sound harder than it really is just because the form is rendered in a table. A table is as good and flexible as any other HTML element and can be transformed into any other form.
Have you ever tried to add a caption to an image inside the SharePoint rich text editor? In this case you might end up editing the source code of the editor. Before you touch the source code of your page, let me show you a more convenient way to achieve this without advanced coding techniques.
Today I decided to publish my table of contents script on github. There it will be much easier to handle all the issues and gives the global SharePoint community the possibilities to contribute to my code.
I know from many people that this script is wide spreader throughout various SharePoint installation. I’m looking forward to improve the code in near future. This table of content script has a real long history for me and I published the first version already for SharePoint 2010. It is still one of my most popular posts.
Let me share some statistics with you:
From now on if you have issues or feature request simply publish them on github. If you like to contribute to this project you are also gladly welcome.