This following will be presented as a panel at CHI2008.org in Florence on Tuesday, April 8. Discussion for the following is at UX-evangelists yahoo group http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ux-evangelists/messages

User Experience evangelism inside an organization is a frequent topic. Methods for marketing user centered design to internal stakeholders have been analyzed in many papers and on panels. Emerging media and new venues have recently presented an opportunity to reexamine methods and goals for external user experience marketing and evangelism. This interactive panel will address motivations and brainstorm about discount methods for promoting the role of the human factors profession to the general public, and communicating directly with the end users. This will be contrasted with the position that a well designed product should market itself, and that money is best spent on design and internal evangelism instead. The panel itself will involve 3 parts: 1. Moderator collecting answers to the "What would you do with a 1 million dollar UX marketing budget?" question via index cards. 2. Four panelists presenting short sales pitch proposing what they would do when faced with the same question. 3. Panel discussion focusing on the contributions from the audience and focused on producing two lists. One would include specific user experience marketing venues (targeted bloggers, un-conferences, think tanks, specific ad words, design-friendly printed publications like Business Week, etc.). The second list would focus on goals and of user experience marketing (raising awareness and promoting better image of user experience vs. engineering and other disciplines, increased sales, better brand, recruiting, swaying executives, etc.). The panel would continue to live after external publication of the two lists, with new blog installments, comments, and any subsequent and open discussions.

We recently delivered a talk at Parc (no longer Xerox Parc), where we talked about the implications of the web 2.0 trends in the enterprise. We also recently invited two of Parc's prominent researchers, Stu Card and Pete Pirolli for a brown bag at Oracle, so here is the double reason for the post.

The most important things about web 2.0 is to first define it and then separate the fad from utlity. Here are some excerpts from a deck hosted on slideshare:
http://www.slideshare.net/lukekowalski/enterprise-web-20-fad-vs-utility/

 Web 2.o Components + UX Dimensions:

• 
  
  Content Aggregation - Mash-ups, RSS feeds, other unstructured data
  
  
• 
  
  UI Platform - Rich Internet Applications
  
  
• 
  
  Blended desktop and Web UX -Desktop Integration
  
  
• 
  
  Search -Semantic Web and Search As Navigation -Back to the command line 
  
  
• 
  
  Collaboration or network effects mechanisms
  
  
• 
  
  Tagging / Bookmarking
  
  
• 
  
  Wikis, Blogs
  
  
• 
  
  Grid and Community Computing
  
  
• 
  
  Shared Tools and Standards--Web 2.0 Enterprise and Standards (SOA, XML,REST interfaces, etc.)
  
  
• 
  
  Design Pattern repositories
  
  
• 
  
  IDEs and Business Process Modelers

 

 Web 2.0 Enterprise Bloopers:

• 
  
  You could rate your fellow employees for appraisals. Give them stars and rating like netflix or digg
  
  
• 
  
  Release training on Youtube. Competitive and monetization issues?
  
  
• 
  
  Have recruiters go to your myspace profile as a reference. Pictures from an old college party?
  
  
• Employees pick (Digg!) next assignment from catalogue. Everyone wants "architectural vision: for their project...

 

Web 2.0 Enterprise - Good Examples:

• 
  
  Content Management, structured and unstructured groups collaborating on projects, rankings, but controlled by corporate policies and business rules
  
  
• 
  
  Hosted Intra-company exchanges and the supply chain-catalogues and trading communities
  
  
• 
  
  Editable portals, where disparate content and mash-ups are possible with standards-based tools and open, robust interfaces
  
  
• 
  
  Custom business intelligence dashboards- by combining structured and unstructured data
  
  
• 
  
  Mobile tagging- field service (factory inspection / QA / QC)
  
  
• 
  
  Rich client financial UIs for information visualization of financial predictions, models, or mash ups of external statistical data sources
  
  
• 
  
  Flexible user task flows, as enabled by declaratively defined business processes (SOA Architectures)
  
  
• 
  
  Support Knowledgebases including internal and external content
  
  
• Hosted and Contextual help systems with Meta Search capabilities
  
• Integration with maps, passing over inventory to ebay, integration of blogs, wikis, and community drive repositories into corporate CMS systems (most already available)

 

Web 2.0 - Enterprise Dimensions:

• 
  
  Security (Check out our Chief Security Officer's Blog, as she commented on these points)
  
  
• 
  
  Scalability
  
  
• 
  
  Performance
  
  
• 
  
  Compliance (SOX, Accessibility, Internal Business Process Audits
  
  
• 
  
  Legal
  
  
• 
  
  Licensing
  
  
• 
  
  Monetization
  
  
• 
  
  Structured + Unstructured Data
  
  
• Integration (hosted, proprietary, client server, 3rd party)

 

The last list spells out the Web 2.0 Enteprise Best Practices:

• 
  
  Implement he best of the consumer realm web 2.0, with policy, security, and scale
  
  
• 
  
  Literal translations from consumer to enterprise seldom successful (Do not Port !)
  
  
• 
  
  Consider user needs (ethnography, wants and needs)
  
  
• 
  
  Productivity vs. Social Goals (Enterprise/Consumer)
  
  
• 
  
  Consider drivers (business goals and regulatory pressures vs. advertising and eyeballs)
  
  
• 
  
  Open standards and flexible tools are the enabling paradigm for collaboration and content aggregation
  
  
• 
  
  Users want to find...They do not care what is structured and what is unstructured data (Bridge)
  
  
• 
  
  Collaboration with flexible and adaptable controls
  
  
• 
  
  Democratization of content is not always possible, nor is auto-policing for quality, compliance, security, performance, and auditing.
  
  
• 
  
  In the end....
  

  Good design makes or breaks enterprise or consumer features, regardless of fad vs. utility ratio

 

To Find out more, check out the presentation on Web 2.0 Enterprise

 

 

 

Here is a guest blog post from George, but first an introduction:

George Hackman is a Senior Director of User Experience at Oracle Corporation.  He has  17 years experience in user experience, beginning with usability testing leading into design, and then design management.  His current focus is on design patterns and guidelines for Oracle Applications.  He has always been an avid cyclist, and recently completed the Wine Country Century with Luke Kowalski.
:)

--------------------------------

When Luke asked me to pick out a list of top 5 books.  I first thought of choosing 5 classics.  5 great books that represent the fundamental core of user experience.  However, I think this type of list is not only easy to find already, but does not reflect my personal experiences.  Instead my top 5 represents my 17 years of UI experience generally, and a particular career path specifically.  I started out as a usability engineer and then worked as a designer and finally a design manager.  

After completing the first five, I found that I needed a sixth book, The 7 habits.  It is not a design book, but it is a very helpful book for any designer.

A Practical Guide to Usability Testing

Joseph Dumas and Janice Redish

I started my career running usability tests and until recently, I continued to run them. Usability testing was one of the first usability engineering methods and is still the most frequently used method.  It is a powerful tool that not only helps you know what works and does not work with your product, but allows you to convince others as well.  Nothing convinces a development team to fix a usability problem more than watching an end user struggle with something.  This book is a great starter manual for how to run a usability test.  It has all the details you need.  It is filled with very practical and tested advice.

IBM Common User Access Guidelines

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_User_Access

My first taste of interaction design was reviewing IBM UIs for conformance with Common User Access (CUA) UI guidelines and standards.  The CUA guidelines are out of print but you can substitute the Windows UI guidelines or Apple UI guidelines.  Every UI designer should know the desktop UI standards.   They still have a lot of impact on web interfaces.

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites

With Web 1.0 we saw a change in the UI technology used to build applications from interactive Java apps to flatter, stateless, HTML apps.  At Oracle, we put a lot of effort redesigning many of our applications to be Web capable. With fewer interactive widgets like pull down menus, web design relied more on organizing principals and search to help users navigate through the system.  This book provides the principals and tools to create the high level design for your website.  It is still relevant today.  Even with interactive widgets of AJAX and WEB 2.0, websites still need to be well organized, and search still needs to be effective

Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability

My experience doing usability testing and UI reviews for conformance to standards provided a great background to get into interaction design.  However, I always struggled to understand visual design.  I always appreciated and respected the work of visual designers, but I never understood it, or felt that I could create anything even visually decent.  This book was the first I found that really made a strong connection between visual design and usability in a way that made total sense.  Not only is the book extremely informative, its own visual design makes it a joy to read. 

Douglas K. van Duyne, James A. Landay, and Jason I. Hong

I have sat through a lot of UI reviews for products where we spent a lot of time telling teams to make small changes to make the products comply with standards.  Standards have the inherent problem of requiring reading and interpretation to use them.  It is pretty well known that most developers already have a lot of other standards to learn and adding another set of standards to the list is not an effective way to get consistent UIs. UI patterns provide high level building blocks that make it easy for developers to put together consistent and usable UIs

When we started the design pattern effort at Oracle, I went searching for a good model of how to do UI patterns. There were a number of web sites out there about patterns (Jennifer Tidwell's) but Van Duyne's book was one of the first published on patterns.  What I like about this book is how it pulls forward the original philosophy and approach of Christopher Alexander's pioneering work on Architectural design patterns into UI design.  The book has a rich set of patterns and is an excellent reference for any UI designer looking to learn or use patterns.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Stephen R. Covey

One of the first hard lessons you learn as a designer is that you do not work alone.  If you want your designs to come to fruition in product, you need other folks to provide requirements, build, market and sell the resulting product. As a design manager, I quickly realized my job was to help enable designers to be effective.   The seven habits in this book help designers and design managers to grow their ability to bring good designs to life.

Take for example the first habit "Be Proactive".  Lets say you are creating a design for a product.  Do you wait until you are finished and then "over the wall it" to development and then react to what they come back with?  You probably will be disappointed with the results.  Instead, be proactive.  Involve the development organization in the design process.  Since they are involved early, you get buy-in and resolve conflicts early in the design process where you have flexibility.  The other six habits are just as useful.

My friend was somewhat frustrated with his offspring. Too many changes of college major and not enough drive to leave the nest. I pitched in to help out.

I decided I would take this kid and show him around work for a couple of hours. It is an impressive campus, what with the lake, the gleaming towers, and the 7 cafeterias. He might become interested in software, and he would not need an H1 visa to get a gig. He might not even need a CS degree, although a Masters often helps for promotions to management. I hatched a plan to take him around the labs and also introduce him to people in marketing, corporate development, development, QA, legal, and user interface design. I could have stretched that visit to cover HR, facilities, and other professions, but things needed to get wrapped up on the various paid projects, so to speak. This way, even if he were not interested in software he would have some exposure to other professions that serve a supporting, or sometimes even defining role.

I have worked in many places where only engineering drove the bus, but Oracle seems to have matured to a point, where the ownership and resource drivers frequently change. This actually keeps things interesting. I can only stand to talk to other interaction designers and development engineers for so long. Lawyers, M&A types, or marketing execs tend to be witty and always bring a fresh perspective to a meeting, lunch outing, or tend to know better hotels and restaurants away from HQ. I have a few of these individuals already booked. We will see what he thinks after the tour...

One of the discussion points with his father centered on what would serve as the best introduction to a particular profession. The immediate answer was "a conference". I am not sure whether this was right. Perhaps a tour, like the one I am planning is more true to life, but I started thinking about the main events in user interface and usability land. In no particular order we have the following:

CHI

If you talk to someone from the USA they will tell you that this is the most popular and best conference. Answers are not always the same in Europe or Asia.

CHI is usually in the US, but every few years (4 or so) they put on a show in Europe.

I have seen a welcome change of focus in that venue. It is now more industry friendly, with design case studies, pragmatic workshops, and even fairly applied technical tracks. You will still see the academic focus, but it is nice to see that the organizers have responded to input from some of the practicioners. I have fond memories of CHIs in Los Angeles, the Hague, and I am looking forward to the one in Florence in 2008. The last one in San Francisco will forever be defined in my mind by the closing plenary. All I need to say is that is started with a 20 minute flickr slide show (travel pics), and it went downhill from there. The opening one was great. We were lucky enough to host Bill Moggridge at Oracle so we had a bit of a preview of the content. The sheer number of sessions, workshops, and posters means that this one will remain popular.

Interact

This one claims to be the biggest and more international, and this year's Rio de Janeiro venue supports that claimThis year's theme is socially responsible interaction. I might significantly increase my carbon footprint if I get on the plane to Rio, but I would enjoy Ben Shneiderman's keynote. I am also told that the Brazillian bonds are a good buy right now. Perhaps there is a local discount outlet? Too bad I am already signed up for the following conference.

HCCI

I usually hear mixed reviews about this one, but I decided to give it a try. My paper, along with my co-athor Kristyn Greenwood did get in, so I will present, as well as visit Oracle China for a couple of business reasons. But July? It might be a scorcher in <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Beijing</st1:place></st1:City>. The conference seems to be evenly split between ergonomics, software, and then design and usability for the other tracks. Virtual Reality and a few other social computing topics are also on the agenda. I will know more once I visitÃi??�Ãi??¢Ãi??¯Ãi??¿Ãi??½Ãi??�Ãi??¦

HFES

This is probably one of the most established of our set of conferences, with ergonomics and usability getting a lot of airtime. You will get a lot of content dealing with workstation ergonomics, aeronautics, and automotive interior design experiments. It all started with the experimental psychologists, so the venue is a welcome change from the pure design-based conferences. Baltimoreis the venue for 2007. There does not seem to a theme, with a yearly meeting in the tagline, instead.

UPA

UPA (Usability Proffessionals Association) will be taking place in Austin, Texas, and this one tends to be focused more on usability engineering, as opposed to interaction design. On the other hand, the theme this year is: Patterns, Blueprints for Usability. Bill Buxton will be the keynote speaker. I had the pleasure of meeting him on a couple of occasions, but we spoke about cars, not user interfaces...

DUX

DUX (Designing User Experience) has usually been in San Francisco. It seems to be a joint venture of ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, and AIGA. The San Francisco location made for a very South of Market climate, with lots of twenty-something knit wool cap types roaming the halls and the art gallery parties, and I do not think that the 2007 Chicago location will change that. You can expect a focus on web design, web 2.0 trend analysis, as well as the user experience methods tracks.

IA Summit

Information Architecture Summit is also on the cutting edge, like DUX, and it often features new media, in additional to the traditional human machine interfaces. The themes for this year in Las Vegas were rich information, rich interaction, and rich relationships. 

There are a few other conerence, and I have enjoyed them, but they are often attached to consultancies like Human Factors International, Adaptive Path, or Norman Nielsen Group. I did attend Usability Week for that last one as an industry speaker (Sydney stop, thanks Dan!), and Jakob Nielsen has the program down to a science. It was very well done. They are a best bet for someone who needs solid and focused tutorials, but the more academic events give a broader overview.

I hope that the guy who comes for my career day is interested enough in the profession to perhaps consider an introductory conference plunge. Even my son told me that he would consider sitting in front of a glowing box, just like dad...

Next time, we will continue the professional intro with a list of a few definitive books on design and usability, to be supplied by George Hackman, Jr.

Perhaps it is the summer effect, but it has been hard to stay in the office. Conferences, lectures, books, and trips are filling out the schedule:

------At the beginning of the year the folks at WebGuild have been kind enough to invite me to participate in a panel titled: "The Future of Site Design". Bill Scott from Yahoo, Alex Limi from Google, and I discussed lessons learned, process challenges, and future trends related to web application development. One of the threads where the panelists were able to come together was a recommendation to implement AJAX-style user interfaces with caution. A number of companies are jumping in, but this is not always in the best interest of the user. Drag and drop is not always the optimal solution. A "select and act" metaphor sometimes works better in certain domains. This was recently highlighted in an article discussing Windows Live Mail, where the new application reverted to an older ("non-AJAX") selection model, already familiar to users of HotMail (web-style check boxes to select rows vs. shift and control-click combinations from the desktop).

"Classic mode wasn't the only bitter pill the development team had to swallow. Even in the full version, it turned out that many customers still wanted to select messages using check boxes rather than a mouse click or keyboard shortcut, much to the dismay of Microsoft's programmers.
"They were digging in their heels," Sim said."

------I have already covered Spark 2.0 in a previous post, but I have recently come across a video of the interview with Lou Rosenfeld and I in Half Moon Bay. The link is posted on Channel 9.

-------CHI2007 (the main Human Computer Interaction conference) was in San Jose this year. I will be attending HCII2007 in Beijing, so I was saving my energy for that  trip, but I unashamedly took advantage of the evening CHI receptions and managed to catch a few out of towners for dinners. I had the pleasure of meeting Bonnie John, one of the most innovative thinkers and prolific publishers in the HCI field. She is at Carnegie Mellon University, already renowned for contributions to this field. Len Bass, George Hackman, and Alex Eiser were also present at this particular dinner and I am happy to pass on a dining recommendation. Thea at Santana Row offers great Mediterranean food. If you happen to have a watch fetish a visit to Tourneau nearby serves as an excellent appetizer.

--------The Oracle User Experience brownbags are an internal resource that serves as an information exchange. In addition to internal speakers and divisional updates we also feature external speakers. We have had folks from Yahoo, Google, but two of the most recent included Bill Moggridge and Ron Baecker. Bill talked about his excellent new book, Designing Interactions. It included interviews with the most prominent Silicon Valley personalities, and he played and narrated a few of those for our audience of designers and usability engineers. Ron Baecker presented an excellent overview of the work done in the collaboration space, with particular attention paid to webcasting.

-------Upcoming is a trip to Stockholm, where I get to hang with the ISO guys, as one of the US representatives (through HFES). One of the assignments will be to look at taxonomies, or classifications, a pretty hot topic with guys involved with design patterns, or any other guidelines.

--------The Oracle bloggers are getting more prolific. Steve Muench recently posted links to some cool Fusion Jdeveloper demos. This is all in context of Oracle donating around 80 rich client, Java Server Faces based widgets, as well as enhancements to Jdeveloper that include a Flash renderkit. Oracle Press Release.

-----On the non-professional front, there are two events of note. One was the Wine Country Century. For some strange reason (middle age denial) I spent 100 miles on a bike one Saturday, some of it uphill. The wives spent the day in a limo, on a tour of the local wineries, but they deserved the break after watching the kids during the Sunday morning training sessions. It stayed in the 70s all day, and I am proud to say I actually finished the event, well ahead of the organizers clearing the course.

J

------The second happening involved fast cars, Ferrari's 60^th anniversary, and run up to Bodega Bay. My car was probably the slowest and the oldest of the bunch, but being a bottom dweller in that club is fun, too. The event was covered by the San Francisco Chronicle. A police escort closed down the access points for the Golden Gate Bridge, and a caravan was able to proceed without being broken up. 3 hours of driving ended with a party at the official San Francisco dealer in Marin. I am still grinning. Shell was one of the anniversary sponsors (thanks for the gas card), and if you like cars, you will love this Shell/Ferrari video.

The summer is just beginning, so expect a few more out and about posts.

Oracle is celebrating its 30^th Anniversary. Time served for me amounts to 8 years and change, all of it at the Silcon Valley headquarters. It is not that long compared to fellow architects who are 20+ year veterans. I did stints in the Tools, Applications, and Corporate divisions so maybe that is why it feels longer. Anniversaries are often a time for reflection and this one made me think about a number of things.

I would like to say that I called the dot com meltdown at the end of the previous century, but I will only claim that I had a vauge feeling or suspicion about an impending crash when I left my startup. In reality the initial reason for hiring on at Oracle was the covered parking (classic cars are my hobby) and the heated swimming pool (middle age dictated more exercise). As a pragmatist I believe that User Centered Design is "what you make it". Business, technical, and other objectives always compete with it, in any corporation, non-profit, or consultancy.  So that one was a wash, or so I thought...

What I have found in 1999 was an atmosphere beyond accomodating. Despite it being a large company it still encouraged innovation. It rewarded individuals who took reasonable risks. It rewarded hard work. And most recently the executives placed a large bet on user experience as a competitive differentiator. It remains a cool ride, a fun place to work, and there is nothing wrong with having 7 cafeterias to choose from during lunch.

In addition to internal perks and a good corporate climate for UI work we are also fortunate to be close to the most hyperactive and creative beehive in the world. Silicon Valley fosters an environment unlike any other. Here is a sampling of recent events, or things we were able to take advantage of:

-A group of us went over to visit the Human Factors folks who work at NASA Ames. How cool is it to be able to swap notes with professionals designing space shuttle cockpits? They came over for a reciprocal visit and got to know our enterprise software focused methodology, but the approach and issues were remarkably similar. Were there major divergences? Their gift shop had better prices.

-We organize brownbags for the internal usability community at large. We had the guys who were responsible for launching Yahoo's design patterns, as well the IDEO co-founder, Bill Moggridge. His Designing Interactions book is a neat departure from the publishing standards. The included video snippets of the luminaries are truly humbling.

-We invited IBM Almaden Human Factors guys over, too, and found that our ethnographic research findings were remarkably similar. Not to mention that the location was more like a resort in the Swiss Alps.

-Xerox PARC is next door. It is considered by many to be the birthplace of computer human factors as a discipline. Its monthly lectures are a treasure. Once again, we are spoiled to have this resource.

-Stanford and Berkeley both have human factors programs. We have worked with students from the latter and attended lectures put on by the former.

And for the finale of the why this is a fun place to work let me turn back to the internal ecosystem, and this one is location-independent. A UI guy can be compelled to jump around from flavor of the month to trendy consultancy every 2 years. But in reality we have that excitement right here. The variety of the product oferrings, cutting edge devepment methodologies, and amazing talent mean that you are never bored. There is almost no need to take advantage of the education benefit provided through human resources. Every project represents a new domain, an opportunity to find out what tax experts, supply chain planners, or database administrators live and breathe. Most of them have magazines dedicated to their specialty! Learning about their worlds is always fascinating, particularly when compared to more common, or generic consumer applications. The intellectual challenge is the most important retention factor, at least for me. It is why I come to work.

A comfy chair and Indian food in building 600 do not hurt, either.J

You never know when you may encounter something exciting on the Intranet. It is best to be buckled in. Don't tell Facilities.

Software accessibility is an extension of usability, although the line that divides the two can be a source of some controversy in regulatory contexts. In design....Making interfaces accessible is an extension of making them usable. Intuitive layouts, clear site architecture, and other good design principles translate to a better foundation for assistive technologies (AT) to access and interpret. AT could be screen readers like Jaws, screen magnifiers included with the popular operating systems, or any number of optimized input devices. Accessibility is most often perceived as an issue for people with some degree of a sight impairment, but the reality is much broader and also includes other disabilities and the aging population. They increasingly need to access applications, websites, and hardware while faced with challenging motor or cognitive disabilities. A brief introduction to disabilities is offered by trace.wisc.edu, led by one of the chief (and most prolific) advocates, Gregg C. Vanderheiden, Ph.D.

Oracle's Accessibility Website states the corporate policy with regard to Oracle's investment and commitment: "Successful access to information by people with disabilities is known as "accessibility." Accessibility is a significant issue for a growing user population and includes not only those born disabled, but those who have experienced incapacitation through accident, illness, or aging."
Oracle's goal is to ensure that products and services are accessible to the disabled community with excellent usability. Industry standards will continue to evolve over time, and Oracle is actively engaged with other market leading technology vendors in addressing technical obstacles.

Oracle's emphasis on achieving accessible solutions hinges on following industry standards. One organization that presses on with harmonization and standardization is the JTC 1, bridging IEC and ISO in the realm of accessibility. Oracle chairs a US based group at INCITS. I have been briefed by colleagues who participated in the W3c WCAG 2.0 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) process. I am one of the US representatives for a series of ISO meetings, where ISO 9241-151 and 171 (originating from the HFES sanctioning body) are discussed, and I have recently started contributing to TEITAC's Section 508 Refresh (US Regulation). Since there are a few of these, and they need to be in the context of specific geopolitical landscapes the industry sees strategic value behind harmonization. I have done one such exercise by mapping a portion of the ISO standard to the existing Section 508 language. This will make it easier for vendors of software and hardware to create products that follow best practices and recommendations. Not too mention that the acronym soup gets confusing very fast.

Ope Source standards consortia also play a crucial role in the process of making technology accessible by promoting guidelines and coordinating with government policy. One such initiative emerged recently, led by Richard Schwerdtfeger. It involved IBM Corporation's donation of code to the Free Standards Group Accessibility effort. The work donated complements Microsoft's earlier work on MSAA.

The new code will go a long way to making rich client user interfaces more accessible on the platforms like Firefox. Design points for this contribution are harmonized with the W3C ARIA specification (Roadmap for Rich Client Interfaces in the Formats and Protocols area). Oracle endorsed this initiative recently with the following statement: "Oracle applauds IBM's contribution of IAccessible2 accessibility technology to the Free Standards Group, significantly advancing accessibility for enterprise applications. This effort is consistent with Oracle's commitment to serving customer requirements with open standards and our work in open standards forums such as W3C to address IT solutions for those with disabilities. As a platinum FSG member, we look forward to working with industry partners and the accessibility community to evolve the IAccessible2 standard and improve the quality and usability of AJAX-style user interfaces."

There is more to come in this arena. Industry consortia, regulatory bodies, advocates, and academia are all contributing to this evolving intersection of technology and social policy.

Oracle will continue its investment to make the interfaces more accessible, to communicate their state via VPATs (Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates), and we will continue to work internally and with our partners to make sure that technology is an aid, and not a hindrance in our industry leading applications. The end result will be applications usable by all...

An Example of a VPAT

Just a reminder that what I am providing herein is for informational purposes. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.  The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described in this document remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.
This document is for informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into a contract or agreement.

Oracle WebCenter and Adobe

On October 24^th, 2006 Rahul B. Patel, vice president, Oracle Server Technologies showed a packed Oracle Open World audience a new product. It was much more than the next iteration of the Oracle Portal application. It has evolved into a modern and open framework for managing internal content, external information, and collaboration tools. It is expected to enable web 2.0-style enterprise mash-ups. Our customers should be able to put almost anything on the page. The new declarative framework is even planned to understand data and controls from Oracle, Siebel, PSFT, and JDEdwards. It would house HTML, ADF Faces rich client Ui regions, not to mention RSS feeds, Wiki, and blog content. It is called WebCenter.

WebCenter also includes an integration with Adobe Flex. About a year ago, a couple of us started to investigate this in the context of the user interaction benefits that the rich Flash experience could offer. But how could it evolve to be an enterprise platform? Before we could articulate this question Adobe announced the publication of the Flash Ajax Bridge and their new Flex product. This meant that they were betting on standards, as well as the need for enterprise users to experience the same benefits of rich interactivity and performance currently being enjoyed by consumers.

 In the recent past we have seen UI technology and UI trends travel from enterprise to consumer software. This is now reversed. Adobe, Google, and Yahoo offer prime examples of rich UI, search, and content services permeating the consumer mindset and then creating the same expectation for enterprise software users. For example: "Johny" searches for car parts via Google, uses his Yahoo mail, and then visits a Flash enabled Website with video. His metaphors, expectations of UI performance, and L&F tastes are now set in stone. He has sampled a really good Cabernet Sauvignon and is forever spoiled (Ask me how I know...I got married in a boutique St. Helena, Napa winery). Johny will carry these new expectations to work where he might have to provision users, manage human resource information, tweak BPEL workflows, or monitor middleware component performance on an IT dashboard.

Adobe and Oracle collaborating (see Oracle Press Release) to enable rich enteprise Ui platforms may allow us to meet this expectation. Here is an example where Flash portlets are embedded in the Oracle WebCenter UI chrome. That fascinating part is achieving inter-portlet communication between disparate content contained in the page. In the first screen the end user is able to move the slider for price and the phones on the right animate, reducing, or increasing the number of choices. The user can also see availability of the phones through an integration with Google Maps, as well as put the phones into a cart.

 The second screen shows a business analyst scenario, where sales phone data can be analyzed, drilled, and reconfigured, all using real-time interactive UIs.

It all translates to choice for Oracle customers. The new framework is expected to allow for a plurality of solutions, be it Flash, HTML, ADF Faces, or other Web 2.0 elements. WebCenter, leveraged for the Ui shell for Oracle Fusion Applications, is also expected to bring flexibility, customization, powerful Secure Enteprise Search, easy SOA integration, and openness of the standalone product.

Just a reminder that what I am providing herein is for informational purposes. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.  The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described in this document remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.
This document is for informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into a contract or agreement.

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SPARK 2.0

What role do software architects play? Do they care about user-centered design? Are they champions of the cause? Do user experience professionals and architects even speak a common language? What happens when you try to draw metaphors from the world of architecture (as in Mies van der Rohe, LeCorbusier, Zaha Hadid, and Richard Meier)?

This was the theme of SPARK 2.0, an event put on by Simon Guest from Microsoft. Attendees included one of the most prominent Ui gurus, Jakob Nielsen. I had the pleasure of being an invited speaker at his conference in Sydney so it was fun to see him again somewhere other than the halls of CHI, a yearly user experience conference. The setting for this meeting of the minds was indeed spectacular. Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay offers incredible scenery and luxurious accommodations. It also happens to be the site of one of my favorite new car shows, the Classics by the Sea, but that is another matter. Other guest included Klaus Kaasgaard, Director of User Experience Research at Yahoo, Adam Richardson from frogdesign, analysts from Gartner, Ovum, and other software architects and user experience professionals. Norman Guadagno was once again one of the expert facilitators for the brainstorming and focus sessions. He did an even better job than at Spark 1. !
What did we talk about? What did we conclude?
Definitions seemed like a main challenge. Architects come in many flavors. Solution architects act as project managers. Technical architects can work on interoperability and implementation. System architects can work on suite design and large scale enterprise strategies. UX architects can facilitate bridges between UX, development, marketing, and technology policy. Roles vary based on scale of the enterprise, domain, and business structure (consultancy, corporation, expert for hire).

Half Moon Bay Ritz-Carlton

Building architect examples did not help to clarify matters, either. While I thought that the visit by John Hall, the architect behind the Ritz Carlton building was fantastic and very inspirational, his role is very different from a software architect. John Hall directed and coordinated his staff, developer, resort operator, owners, and represented the needs of the end user, the hotel guest. He was in charge of the overall project. Software architects often serve as consultants and seldom own the means of production. Large development staffs usually belong to product VPs. Architects can influence user experience, but they are not usually in the position to mandate it, or bake it into the development process.

Software architects still wield power and their actions can result in good or bad user experience. A system design or a schema that is directly exposed as the user interface is a common example of what not to do. Well thought out Inter-application information architecture is an example of a software architect thinking about the real human tasks, and not about pure technology interop.
Software architects are driven by the same forces as designers. They crave original solutions to common problems, and want to provide them in the most elegant fashion, using state of the art technology. They understand the reduced training costs, total cost of ownership benefits, and the intangible benefits of world class user interfaces.
The dialogue between user experience and software architects proved to a productive one. We mapped out organizational models, motivational forces, as well as tools that could help us understand each other better. And one of my own contributed summaries was that at the end of the day convincing another stakeholder to uptake your agenda is not always the most efficient approach. Finding out what drives them and then framing your UX contribution in their terms, vocabulary, and in the context of their goals works better. For that...this 2.5 day session was invaluable.

User Experience designers usually place emphasis on user requirements gathering, information architecture, task flows, and layout. Look and Feel considerations do play a role, but they are often secondary. Skinning has been popular for a while now in the web world. The idea is to evolve the look and feel as often as necessary, with no impact on the underlying logic. Skins are applied in an automatic and all-enveloping fashion. To use an automotive analogy you would want to update the headlights, rear end styling, trim details, interior finishes and configurations, but do so without changing the chassis, major subcomponents, and other expensive to design and change components. This is often referred to as a mid-model run restyling change. In software we have sometimes changed the look and feel when the technology and architecture evolved (re-engineering), and other times when we felt we needed to make the look and feel more contemporary (mid-tech stack changes). Here are examples of both, starting with 1998, conveniently, the year I started at Oracle. The compendium below is a little application division centric, but the point would be similar for server technology.  Coincidentally the user base over there seldom requires the same style, layout, and information architecture. Skinning flexibility no longer forces us into a one size fits all solution. Here are a few of the UI examples over the ages:

Forms is a technology stack that is still out there and working very well for a subset of our application customers. It is a collection of user interfaces used by accountants, supply chain planners, manufacturing, human resources, and other business customers, in a more heads down mode. Forms look and feel can be updated, but the logistics are different than just making changes to a stylesheet file in the web application world.

Oracle Forms

An interim set of user interfaces was born when Oracle was one of the first enterprise companies to embrace the Internet. Some have characterized it as "webyfying forms" thus it can be classified as more an interim change (at least compared to BLAF)

Web Forms

It is hard to believe that BLAF (Browser Look and Feel) was born 7 years ago. It was designed for an occasional user recently exposed and quickly accustomed to web interaction metaphors made popular by the business to consumer e-commerce sites. The two applications that prompted the change to the new web application look and feel were Self Service Purchasing and Oracle Exchange. This is an example of a platform/chassis change, where a re-engineering was done at the tech stack level. These were high profile pilots and earned our team and user experience in general visibility with top management.  BLAF user interfaces still serve a role, just like Forms do, but we have heard a number of suggestions including the desire for higher screen density, more data/less chrome and scrolling on the page, fewer clicks (page repaints) to complete the task, and an update of the color palette.

A page on skinning BLAF to partially address some of these concerns can be referenced through the link below:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/101/howtos/adfskins/index.html.

BLAF

More of the customer feedback is being considered for R12, the future applications release. Page density, new colors, new controls, more efficient layouts, search, and navigation changes are scheduled to be available to customers, on top of the more topical style-only changes available through BLAF re-skinning.

Preview of Oracle EBS Swan (Subject to Change)

An even more profound change is expected to come with Oracle Fusion Middleware serving as our base for enterprise applications. Early releases are already serving up the new Ui bits. Here we are able to provide more comprehensive changes that involve the transition to rich client Uis. Greater interactivity and a style closer to a desktop application are in store for our users. Pull-down menus, drag and drop, scrolling result sets, as well as a new design for home page layout/navigation/menus are  planned, with some base components already donated the Java Server Faces project (see earlier posts).

Preview of Oracle Fusion UX (Subject to Change), To be discussed (unblurred) and shown in a later episode...

Just a reminder that what I am providing herein is for informational purposes. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.  The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described in this document remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.