Anna Wichansky, Senior Director, Applications User Experience and Chair, Oracle Usability Advisory Board
Back in April, I blogged about the Oracle Usability Advisory Board's strategic meeting on the next level of user experience for enterprise applications. Let me give you a preview of what you will see at OpenWorld: Sunday, October 11: Sunday is User Group Day at OpenWorld. At the Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) Fusion Strategy Council Meeting, Floyd Teter of Jet Propulsion Laboratory will host Jeremy Ashley, Vice President, and Katie Candland, Director of Applications UX, as they provide an overview of how the next-generation Oracle Applications were designed. This work involved customer site visits, articulation of user requirements, design of workflows, and building and testing prototype software with end-users before developers began product coding. In designing a more consumer-like user experience, they strived to consolidate information into the fewest possible screens and reduce the number of steps to accomplish key tasks. The entire next-generation suite is built on a single visual interface framework, with the main controls laid out the same way in all products. Monday, October 12: There are three important UX events: The Oracle Usability Advisory Board customer panel will discuss how customer collaboration can improve the user experience. Panelists are Chuck Abell of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sarah Gatenby of Santa Clara University, Carrie Medders of California State University East Bay, and Kim Murphy of Emerson. They are likely to mention the focus groups and surveys the board took part in to provide data on mobile applications, search, and social networking features, as well as to review next-generation software prototypes. They have also contributed their top 10 issues on existing enterprise software, not only to current software developers but also so that next-generation designers can benefit from them. They will discuss what they get from being on the board, and how they justify this activity to their organizations. Sherry Mead, a User Experience Architect who chairs the Oracle Usability Advisory Board Working Group on Integration & Performance, will be on a panel about how search technologies can improve customers' overall experience with enterprise software. The panel will describe features for "smarter search," such as synonym matching, dictionary matching for misspellings, "fuzzy" search, and the progressive relaxation algorithm, currently available in Oracle Secure Enterprise Search. Sherry will also describe how Oracle's next-generation applications search is more like an Internet search engine than conventional, transactional search; it allows federated search across applications and task navigation by searching for any database object in the suite. Also on Monday, Adrien Lazzaro, a Senior User Experience designer, will demonstrate the desktop widgets, which enable greater integration between PC desktop and enterprise applications, at the Unconference. This is a unique, informal, interactive venue in which speakers self-schedule their presentations at overlook locations in Moscone West, 3rd floor. Desktop widgets for Applications Unlimited sales applications, as well as Oracle Worklist and Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, will be shown. These address the next-level usability needs for a consumer-like experience by providing simpler navigation to key functions, a collaborative workspace with widgets securely embedded in portals, and real-time data for users. On Tuesday, October 13, Jeremy Ashley and Patanjali Venkatacharya will give a presentation entitled "User Experience Innovations -- Oracle's end-to-end user experience platform". This presentation highlights enhancements that are available today through Fusion Middleware 11gR1. These include innovations exposed through Oracle WebCenter, Application Development Framework (ADF), common Metadata Services (MDS), Web2.0 Services (WebCenter Services), and more. The backstory here involves how the Applications User Experience team worked proactively with the entire platform organization, including the Oracle Fusion Middleware development team, to tightly integrate UX requirements with core processes, at a variety of levels in the entire software stack. This resulted in a complete, open, and integrated end-to-end user experience platform which allows Applications Unlimited product line user experiences to co-exist with one another on the same standards-based environment. More information on all of these presentations is available in our Events column. I look forward to meeting our readers in person at Openworld 2009.
The good news is that some of these advancements will be discussed at Oracle OpenWorld, to be held at Moscone Center, San Francisco, California on October 11-15, 2009. Several members of the Applications User Experience group will make presentations throughout the week. In fact, this is the greatest opportunity yet for the Applications UX department to share its contributions to the next-generation design of Oracle Applications with customers. Organizers are expecting a record number of attendees at Moscone Center. Many customers have already indicated that usability is a big, if not the biggest, factor in purchasing enterprise software.
