One of the strands that we’re currently exploring is the use of the Windows 8 Metro style layout as a point of inspiration for a potential page layout and user interface design. There are several useful things to look at for those developers thinking along similar lines. The first is the Microsoft guidance for developers about how to use tiles (in the square and wide tile states) and the second is a tile template catalog that gives some examples of how the different interations can be used.
The http://metro-webdesign.info design
Several web developers have created user interface designs that take elements of the Metro interface and using HTML, CSS and Javascript have recreated many of the gestures and tile behaviours that are available. A great starting point for looking at some of these is this article from last year by the Web Resources Depot. Unfortunately they have a dependency on suitable modern and standards compliant browsers, so if your organisation runs IE8 as part of it’s current desktop image, then parts of some of these designs just won’t work, or work, but don’t include the nice functions – compare the ryanlowdermilk example on IE8 and IE9 to see the difference.
The Tim Holman example is beautifully done, but whilst I could get it to work in FF12, IE9 was not playing nicely. So the next steps for us are to ponder some designs that don’t depend on the subtle effects, but take inspiration from the layout. The use of tiles with two size states is an interesting idea, but the real priority to working out how to categorise content either as default or by user tagging to populate different page elements that can then be displayed.
Cris Bloomfield's Professional Blog 
January 14, 2013 at 9:10 pm
Cris
If you like Windows Store UI and SharePoint then you should check out myday from collabaco http://www.collabco.co.uk/
January 17, 2013 at 10:49 am
Cheers Lee, myday seems pretty neat and well thought out.
The transition from our current personalised web environments to something Metro-esque is seen as too great a leap at present so we’ll probably have to step stone to an interim solution. It’s bizarre given how many people are carrying smartphones in their pockets now with these types of UIs but the same people seem to recoil at the suggestion of full websites being delivered in such a way. They’d be shouting mayday!
There’s work to do for these concepts to become seen as valued and accepted and that’ll take some good prototypes being developed that allow the benefits to be demonstrable within the institutional context. The potential is for web content to become increasingly linked and integrated with desktop content, but with this from of web design pattern it’d mean we’d have to be Wndows 8 ready too. We’re doing some very preliminary looking at that as a potential combination option.
Our first step is to get from multiple personalised web environments down to a lower number and ultimately via the Manchester Working Environment programme down to a single entity. There’s a whole sphere of work around personalising content along the way that will make content such as news and events relevant to individuals based on their role and position in the hierarchical organisational structure. That’s what we’re planning on building in Sharepoint.