And change out some colors. I remember SharePoint 2003 when I would talk to developers about how much we can customize the user interface. It really wasn’t much more than the above reality. As our design team works closely with our SharePoint development team with the MOSS 2007 platform, we continue to push further into interesting realms. Shortly after 2007 was released and we were working on our first project, we would get some grief for various rounded edge treatments. I often find myself in the middle of the designer/developer battle (let’s call it a healthy collaboration). As we have now spent almost 2 years pushing the platform, we find that it is not too much different than building a custom application or website in terms of approach and design solution. From wireframes to design comp in Photoshop to Master Page, we can almost always create a well branded, user-centric design. For public websites, we are also able to enhance the experience where appropriate with the use of Flash. We implement it in such a way that image and text variables can be controlled through the SharePoint content management capabilities being fed via XML into the swf file.
Maybe that’s too much information, but the point is that overall, I am pretty happy where SharePoint has gotten in terms of ability to address user experience through intelligent design.