Editor’s note: Oracle OpenWorld 2008 took place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center from September 21-25, 2008. Misha Vaughan was responsible for coordinating the Applications User Experience contribution to OpenWorld this year. This is the second part in a two-part series. “Applications User Experience Highlights – Part 1” appeared on .

Misha Vaughan, Architect, Applications User Experience

There were two pretty cool demos on the demogrounds floor in Moscone West: Oracle Asia Research and Development Center (OARDC) and a company called Qik.

At the OARDC pod, Lennard Low and Jeffrey Saleh (Image 1) showcased the development of some pretty ground-breaking user experiences for 3-D artists. First, they demonstrated a Web application intended to support the content management and production pipeline for 3-D artists working in movie studios (that just has a generally high cool-ness factor). The neato stuff had more to do with desktop widgets and gesture-based interfaces.

Image 1. Lennard Low (left) and Jeffrey Saleh (right) of Oracle Asia Research and Development Center

Turns out that production artists don’t care much about enterprise software (not a big surprise), so they created a design where the artists see only what they really need to see, by exposing a desktop widget in a really small form factor…. smart design.

The demo also included a gesture-based interface, which takes a paper-based method of storyboarding (Image 2), moves it to a wide-screen display, and uses a gesture-based interface (like the Nintendo Wii) to interact with the content at a distance.

Image 2. Standard paper-based storyboarding from Egg Story

Qik showcased a different type of experience related to mobile. They had a setup where conference goers could install their applications on their mobile phones, shoot movies with their phones, and then have the movies instantly pushed to a Web site. This allowed conference-goers to share the experience with friends and colleagues who could not attend.

Image 3. Jane Fu from Qik with a mobile phone shooting a movie

Thanks to Stephen Armbruster (Oracle Principal Internet Sales Conulstant), I got to see something I’d been hearing about but didn’t know much about: the User Productivity Kit of the almost-completed Oracle acquisition, Knowledge Factory. The User Productivity Kit is pretty slick from a user experience perspective. The core offering is a contextual, embedded, multimodal, online training for Oracle Applications. Let me break that down for you:

• Contextual – When an end user is working with an application, their selection of help will be related to the actual part of the application they are working in.


• Embedded – It is minimally exposed in the user interface; it has a small, discrete footprint.


• Multiple modes of learning – This is the REALLY cool part. They provide field-level training for a particular application in four different ways 1) a walk-through demonstration (“See it”), 2) a hands-on trial (“Try it”), 3) the ability to test your knowledge without mucking up the system (“Know it”), and 4) walking through the real-time application to complete the task (“Do it”).

From an end user experience perspective, I think this makes a very strong contribution to productivity. Not having to go offline to review documentation, or call a help desk, or even just throw up your hands in frustration -- all contribute to the bottom line.

Now I can’t answer any specific questions about how they do all this with their technology…they (thanks Stephen!) told me but I kept paying attention to the demos. So if you want to know more…feel free to contact these guys.

Image 4. Kambiz Ghafourpour (Oracle Principal Curriculum Developer) and Ron Kraft (Oracle) demonstrating the User Productivity Kit

In the final analysis, I thought there was quite a broad representation of user experience highlights at OpenWorld this year--even more so than last year. Who knows what impact the economic turmoil will have on what’s pipelined for OOW 2009…but it will be cool to see.