SharePoint Portal - User Engagement Tips

We are seeing now many organizations have implemented their internal portals using SharePoint or corporate are thinking in direction to do the same. One of the common challenges faced when we roll out the portal is User Engagement. 

User Engagement 

1. How much your employees love this portal and use it in day to day activities. 
2. Do they have all the needed content in the portal? Is everything cooked up in the home page itself (I mean all the information in single page itself)?
3. First of all, do they visit this site? If it all is it attractive to them?

These are all the common questions which immediately pop up when we want to understand and get tangible outcomes on user engagement in the SharePoint Portal.  There are some simple tips that we can follow throughout the Portal design to improvise the user engagement. Here you go,

Keep it Simple
Simple doesn't mean plain. Do not over complex your portal or information access in the portal and don't think everyone who accesses this portal should be aware of what you have developed. Simple means free of complexity and unnecessary elements, that could clutter your portal which eventually keep the users from engaging with your content. Rather than distracting the users, we want to include features they need and will use. Of course, different organizations need different functionality for their portal, but no matter what those needs are, we should keep portal clean and clutter-free

What is Important

Draw user attention to what is important for your portal or the actual purpose the portal serves. You can avoid all cosmetics stuff and high light only the content that you want to convey to users. Also understand how do you want to arrange your content in the page (like which needs to first, what content need to be placed in the sites, any information that need to be placed in the bottom of the page, any content which needs to be pop-up..etc). Because eye-tracking studies show that users tend to look at web content in a certain order, and by following that order we can present our information in an effective way.

Keep it clean

Either it is internal site or heavy user based public facing site, keep the site clean and simple. Use an appropriate font, color, images as the way we tend to deal with the contents. Don’t put too much of jazzy things when you want to convey an important information to users via portal. “White Space is allowed” – yup, don’t try to occupy every pixel in the page with information; having a desirable white space is still attractive and brings more focus to the content.

Communication

Developing the portal itself is quite easy compared to communicating the need to portal to everyone in organization. Try to create communication channel or plans to bring people to the portal and make innovative marketing to attract the people.

What you develop, it is tangible and measurable only when people use it. All your metrics around the portal is purely dependent on your user engagement.