Introducing SharePoint design ideas

The new Design Ideas feature will surely be useful for a lot of your customers. Unfortunately, as mentioned by a few people in this thread - it goes against our Brand requirements so not something we would want to see in our environment, or at least until we've had plenty of time to fully test it, etc. Definitely needs to be a way to opt in to this, not just pushed out to all customers.

Also, if using the Design Ideas, it would be great to be able to edit an existing page, try out a few of the design ideas, and then Discard the page changes. Unfortunately, as part of the new page co-authoring feature that's currently rolling out, Microsoft are removing Discard Changes for pages. These design ideas are another example of why we absolutely need Discard Changes to stay (as well as destroying our workflows, version history, page lifecycle [draft, published], etc.).

I left a long post on that announcement but thought the need to add one here too so your customers know that Discard Changes will no longer be available (very shortly). There has been zero communication about this change and will cause major impacts for us and across your other customers.

Sara_Cummings, we would prefer option 2. 

I know it's too late for this option, but ideally, things like this would be a SharePoint feature that we would activate if and when we decided to use it. That way we could do the prep work, tag images, and train employees before it just "shows up" in the system. 

Our Branding team are going to have a meltdown over this. This is another example of Microsoft trying to be helpful but causing real headaches for organisations that have basic standards around branding and UX in place. Please ALWAYS include a switch for admin to turn these sorts of features off. For context, I have worked with SharePoint since 2003 in six different organisations and this would not be welcomed by any of them at any point.

This would only be useful if we can create our own designs using our branding only and use our Org Asset library before stock images.

Do Microsoft actually run their ideas past SharePoint admins at "normal" organisations? I'd happily take part in such a panel or vote in a forum as to what the real world sees as priorities for development. I'm aware there are ways of voting for features and fixes but that tends to be to resolve existing issues raides by users rather than voting on solutions that are instigated by Microsoft don't seem to address a real problem.  

Our problem is that the design ideas violate our branding rules. They are available to anyone who edits a page, so they assume they are approved. It definitely would have been better for us if we could have activated the design ideas after reviewing them, although I think we would probably leave them disabled. It might not be so bad if we were able to curate the imagery available to authors, but even then, we would only be halfway to meeting our branding requirements.

Why doesn't this pull from the Your Organization folder instead of stock images?

I, once again, concur with RMatlack. Especially on the ability to decide whether to activate it for our organization. This isn't something that every organization needs nor wants, and it's especially harsh when it's simply forced upon us as if Microsoft is telling us how to design our content with no regard for our brand and content and communications strategy.

I am in 100% agreement with DaveGlanville and grant_jenkins. Features like this may be great for your customers without established brands, but they're absolutely not appropriate for customers that have established brands that don't want users to be creative outside of the parameters set by branding teams. Customers absolutely should have the ability to turn off these sorts of things. This feature does not solve problems for a lot of your customers, it just creates new problems. grant_jenkins's point about the removal of Discard changes and how that will affect this is spot-on. 

Like DaveGlanville asked, is there any sort of year-long panel where Microsoft discusses potential changes with actual customers to see if there is a widespread desire for them? The way Microsoft uses its products internally is not an indicator of how customers in other industries use them. 

Hi, I have a few questions on these:

• Documentation - Is there any documentation bar the roadmap? I did a search for "SharePoint design ideas" on site:learn.microsoft.com and couldn't find anything 😞 ... or is it really not needed?
• Experience Annoyance - I frequently find such thing extremely annoying from a UX/UI POV, is there a *user level* option to never see these?
• User Level AI Opt Out - There should always be a user level option to opt out of such AI based infrastructure
• Admin Level AI Turn Off - There should be a way for admins to control if this is even available, and to manage the AI interactivity, here

Sorry if this all sounds overly negative, I do like new things ... but I will always oppose any AI interaction that isn't 'Opt in' ... instead of 'Opt out' or no option to disable at all.

Sara_Cummings Being able to customize it with company-approved images (including backgrounds) and not stock images would be a start. I don't ever want stock images or stock backgrounds. If I can fill it up with what our company has approved -- and remove whatever Microsoft "recommends" -- that would work. I'm not trying to design fancy pages for people to spend a lot of time browsing. I need people to quickly get the information they need to do something, without fuss, and get on with their job. I have hundreds of sites with hundreds of editors and people often don't remember what is and isn't allowed per our guidelines when they make two or three edits a year. They see a new feature and think that since it's there it's okay to use. I don't want them to spend time doing something that I'm just going to undo.

Would love the option to restrict access to specific sp sites, users, and admins to prevent misuse of the brand in a large company with multiple divisions and departments. For example, once the branded font is enabled, currently it can be applied to any sp site.

Love it! Highly anticipated