Usability and User Experience Matter in Enterprise 2.0 Apps
Welcome to the second in a series of Friday’s Features showcasing the latest and greatest in enterprise apps usability. Many ERP software vendors including Epicor, IFS, Infor, Lawson, Microsoft Dynamics, and Syspro have made significant progress in improving usability as they progress to Enterprise 2.0 apps. As mentioned in a December 29th, 2008 post, customer expectations for Enterprise 2.0 apps include users rich user experiences, actionable insight, and business process orientation. The impact of overall user experience and user interaction often tie back to seven key Enterprise 2.0 characteristics:
- Richer user experiences - role based scenarios across various usability paradigms
- Business process orientation – support for end to end business processes
- Configurable change – designing with flexible models and rules instead of customizations
- Actionable insight – pulling all the key information to make a decision in the context of business process and user role
- Collaboration – providing secure private interactions and open and innovative connection with stakeholders
- Intelligent response – responding to contextual models and business events
- Hybrid deployment – deploying all models from on-premise, hosted, instance virtualization, multi-tenant SaaS, and cloud based BPO.
Part 2: IFS Brings Consumer IT Elements to Enterprise 2.0
In October 2007, IFS introduced Project Aurora at the IFS World Conference in Berlin. Key elements included a revamped user experience based on two themes: innovation and evolution. Aurora is a Rich Internet Application deployed using .NET. To date, benefits of the new Rich Internet Application (RIA) UI include faster response times, web protocols, security sandbox, less network traffic, and local desktop integration. The project focused on breaking down barriers to productivity and delivered inter-application navigation and enterprise search. Technologies behind the RIA innovations rely on AJAX – script run time, Java FX – Java VM, Flash – Flash run-time, Curl – Curl RTE, and WinForms, WPF – .NET CLR
- Design elements inspired by Apple’s iPod. The interface uses a range of new navigation technologies such as adaptable link pages, contextual breadcrumb navigation, and visual recent screens. From the left column, users are treated to strong design elements such as inter- application navigation, iPod like short cut icons, and quick entry data widgets.
- Personalized portals support a role based view. Aurora supports role based personalization capabilities and widgets. Users see relevant information as needed for a persona. Recent navigation screens provide visual design elements to navigate between recent screens. Right hand column elements include information rich alert bulletins, common actions, and status updates.
- Enterprise search addresses requirements for non-structured data. New search features help customers uncover lost assets, discounts, and other information.
- Built in analytics drive actionable insight. IFS Analytics tie to XL through Microsoft Office Business Applications concept.
Software Insiders Point of View Photo Stream (click image for details)
(Source: IFS )
Your POV.
Do you like how your apps UI currently look? Will user experience lead to cost savings for you? Is this enough to make you want to switch? What do you think of IFS’ UI? Post your thoughts or send me a private email to rwang0@gmail.com.
Friday’s Feature: Snapshots in Enterprise 2.0 UX/UI
Next Friday’s Feature: Epicor 9
Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved.
2 Comments »
It is great to see energy behind really thinking through the user experience – whether under the guise of enterprise 2.0, consumerization, or even Total Ownership Experience (remember that one, Ray?). Without being a user experience expert, I thought I would answer your calls for comments.
It starts with the challenge I’ve heard from the ’90′s – Amazon doesn’t need an owners manual. The example shown reflect a lot of power … and for some reason, I fear that still reflects much of enterprise software thinking today.
IFS has combined a lot of the right elements…
- portal like
- context driven right hand / secondary navigation increasingly important for better guidance (e.g,. when did an app actually make you better at your job)
- familiar browser metaphor and controls
- one can hope, a new way to navigate directly to tasks and records, as well as unstructured content via search
… but lacks style, regardless of whether they took Apple’s reflective gunmetal greys.
- plethora of buttons and things that could be buttons, icons, and dark shadows that all draw at the eye and attention
- traditional looking forms surrounded by blocks of stuff. While the navigation and right hand context menus provide interesting navigation, I am not sure we are seeing innovation on how to present and capture information. Examples where tremendous amount of information is distilled by an interesting use of RIA is something like mint.com
- the search screen shot seems to be access to find stuff, but seems to miss the opportunity to actually bring answers forward. For instance, rather than a list of puchase records that match the search criteria, the top of the results list could include a couple widgets that show a summary of that PO without having to navigate to the record, expose some quick actions appropriate, such as approve … all within the search context, making search an integral part of the application flow and usage model.
These experiments in user experience on platforms that provide for rapid experimentation generate the real UI innovation … to come. The limited IFS examples here reflect template driven designs that look quick to modify and extend, but unlike Apple, these templates are utilitarian lacking some of the style that Apple provides with its templates that allow even poor artists like me look decent. Great to see folks like IFS and Oracle CRM pushing our collective UX thinking forward.
The great thing about UI is everyone can have an opinion. In addition, it evolves as we, as an industry, continue to mature our thinking, even as our customers become more demanding of how they interact with the services that hopefully help them do their jobs.
It’s inspirational to see such good UI. After old mainframe screens and limited featured html, its nice to see rich internet solutions with new technology. .NET products seem to be more advanced. When will SAP and Oracle catch up ?
UwE Mueller
UX designer
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