Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience

Oracle’s User Experience team took a page from successful salespeople in creating the recent releases of the Mobile Sales Assistant (MSA) application. Speed, flexibility, and efficiency are important ingredients for making a job on the go work well. These components were also important in the creation and fine-tuning of MSA, according to team members who worked on the sales application for the BlackBerry and the iPhone.

“When you consider the new technologies coming into the marketplace, like the iPhone, the ability of Oracle’s teams to develop applications for them has to be nimble and fast,” said Madhuri Kolhatkar, Director of Oracle’s Applications Unlimited User Experience team. “So when we introduce something new, it has to be usable.” That means seeking input from users from the beginning of the application’s design process, and gathering their feedback in a systematic way. For example, some users said they’d like to see a mini calendar pop up when scheduling an appointment—a common feature used by travelers when booking a flight online or reserving a hotel room, according to Erika Webb, a User Experience Manager who was involved in the production of MSA.

Image 1. In the screenshot above from the Mobile Sales Assistant application, a calendar opens up as the user checks appointments, showing the user at a glance how the day’s appointments are set.

“We tried to make it very simple,” said Dhayan Kumar, a Senior Interaction Designer who worked on MSA. Exposing the design to real-world users, and adjusting the design as users offered their feedback, was critical. “Where there was a new feature or a new requirement, that’s where customer feedback really helped,” he said. “We talked a lot with users about the nice-to-have things,” such as the ability to take notes on a handheld device or access customer data on demand. These features were included in the finished product.

Image 2. This image shows how MSA’s list of appointments would look on an iPhone screen. Users have easy access to contacts and accounts, and the ability to see recent and frequently- viewed items is one click away.

Hody Crouch, product manager for MSA, said a highlight of developing the application was “working on something where the user was so central in all of the decisions we were making.” Users recruited for the research came back week after week to an evolving design that incorporated their feedback. The Oracle team’s approach gave designers and user experience professionals the ability to look more deeply at the design, which had unique challenges. Not only did the application need to be adapted for the small, mobile device screen, but the goal was to provide a subset of what users need on a daily basis from their desktop, Crouch said. So the Oracle team needed to collect feedback on everything from what icons should look like to whether the messaging functions worked the way users would expect them to work.

The research was gathered during intense feedback sessions in the laboratory and remotely, using software to share images online. The work took place in July and August 2008, so that the application could be unveiled at Oracle’s OpenWorld 2008 in September. A total of four users were involved in the intense iterative participatory design cycle. The team members working on the application were in several different time zones, allowing work to continue around the clock.

Image 3. This image shows how Oracle teams from around the world collaborated on the Mobile Sales Assistant application.

Kolhatkar said the MSA applications have to be developed fast, “and the user experience has to be really great – that is why we apply an agile or rapid development process and fine-tune the apps to the user’s needs.”

For more information about the Mobile Sales Assistant application and how it can work on your BlackBerry or iPhone, listen to Hody Crouch’s presentation at http://www.slideshare.net/rdonohue/oracle-mobile-sales-assistant-at-work-slideshare-presentation.