A Software Insider's Point of View

Usability and User Experience Matter in Enterprise 2.0 Apps

Welcome to the third 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:

1. Richer user experiences - role based scenarios across various usability paradigms
2. Business process orientation - support for end to end business processes
3. Configurable change - designing with flexible models and rules instead of customizations
4. Actionable insight - pulling all the key information to make a decision in the context of business process and user role
5. Collaboration - providing secure private interactions and open and innovative connection with stakeholders
6. Intelligent response - responding to contextual models and business events
7. Hybrid deployment - deploying all models from on-premise, hosted, instance virtualization, multi-tenant SaaS, and cloud based BPO.

Part 3: Epicor Delivers A Broad Range of User Experiences Creating Choice and Flexibility

Epicor announced Epicor 9 on October 20, 2008 at their annual Perspectives user conference and made available the product in GA on December 8, 2008. Built on Epicor Internet Component Environment (ICE) 2.0, this foundational architecture provides users with Web 2.0 capabilities that support application to application integration and business to business collaboration. Epicor 9 serves up the client code and application business logic as self-describing business services. Here are some key UX/UI highlights:

• Role based dashboards provide actionable insight. Users are treated to a series of role based interactive dashboards.  Dashboards take advantage of Microsoft UI metaphors such as the outlook navigation pane, rbbons. Users can drill in data, export to excel, make changes, and come back to the same screens.   Out of the box, Epicor delivers 250+ key performance indicators (KPIs).
  
• Epicor Everywhere Framework delivers a consistent user experience. Regardless of the user interface, customization and user personalization remains intact because everything starts from the same meta data.  Consequently, Epicor 9 can run on a C#.NET Smart Client, any web client, and mobile devices on platforms such as Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Apple iPhone
• Epicor Information Worker integrates with Microsoft Office technologies.  Information worker usability leverages Office Business Applications.   Users improve access to business data through this desktop productivity solution and can work in native applications such as Outlook, Word, and Excel.

Software Insiders Point of View Photo Stream (click image for details)

(Source: Epicor )

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 Epicor’s UI? Post your thoughts or send me a private email to rwang0@gmail.com.

Friday’s Feature: Snapshots in Enterprise 2.0 UX/UI

1. Epicor 9
2. Eshbel Priority 13
3. IFS Applications 7.5
4. Lawson SmartOffice 9.0x
5. Microsoft Dynamics AX and NAV

Next Friday’s Feature: Lawson SmartOffice

Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved.