Jeremy Ashley, Vice President, Applications User Experience
with Misha Vaughan, Architect, Applications User Experience

I managed to leave a rainy San Francisco only to get wetter in the humidity of Orlando, Florida. The conference was spread out across the exceptionally large Orange County Conference Center. This year the Applications User Experience team was running a number of presentations:

• User Experience Innovations, Jeremy Ashley & Patanjali Venkatacharya


• The Future of Enterprise is with the Mobile Workforce, Lynn Rampoldi –Hnilo


• How the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne User Interface Continues to Evolve, Madhuri Kolhatkar


• Oracle Applications Usability Testing, Velynda Prakhantree

We also had an eye-tracking system set up in the demogrounds on the main exhibit hall to measure the usability of two Web sites for customers: usableapps.oracle.com and oracle.com. Our new Tobii system allowed users to walk up and get calibrated for eye-tracking in just a few seconds.

Fig 1. Michal Kopec and Joyce Ohgi demonstrate Tobii eyetracker at COLLABORATE09, Orlando, Florida, May 2009.

Our walk-up users responded to the uncanny way their eyeballs were represented on the screen -- you see these two animated white dots peering at you. Once they got beyond that, we managed to gather some great data on how users search for information on content-based Web pages.

One thing I always enjoy doing at these conferences is walking around the exhibition hall floor when few other people are there first thing in the morning. I chatted with several consulting organizations on the COLLABORATE09 exhibit hall floor. I talked to them about their end users and feedback they have received on user experiences of Oracle Applications.

The feedback fell into three different categories that can be described as a pyramid of issues (Fig 2).

1. Widget-level issues were at the bottom of the pyramid and the biggest issue. This kind of issue is a specific concern about a particular feature on a page. An example is the need for “row-level validation on tables” from JD Edwards. I would guess that more people have their individual wish-list items that were at a component level. The majority of feedback fell into this category.

2. The training time needed for some of the products ranks as the second biggest issue. Customers were looking for ways to get their end users up-to-speed faster. This is especially challenging when trying to deliver training to end users across the current suite of applications.

3. Consumer-level user experience was the third category of feedback, and the smallest. In general, customers would ask, “Why isn’t it as easy as some of the other things I use?” For example, “Why doesn’t search work like Google?” Another request is for a purchasing experience similar to Amazon.

Fig 2. The pyramid of user experience issues.

Attending COLLABORATE is always a fascinating experience, because we get to see a broad section of our users all in one place, rather than the individual sessions we run in a usability lab. You get a much better feeling of how the wind is blowing for customers.

As always at COLLABORATE, we experienced a vibrant user community who is very enthusiastic about our products and equally enthusiastic about giving their feedback.

Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience

All of the user experience improvements in the new Web-based Agile 9.3 Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) boil down to two things: This software is more efficient and easier to use than it was before. New features and keyboard shortcuts help customers navigate more quickly, enter data faster, and complete tasks with far fewer clicks, which leads to a dramatic improvement in productivity in the PLM suite of applications.

The PLM software helps manufacturing engineering companies, such as companies that design and build everything from electronics to medical devices, manage the entire life of a product, from its conception to its distribution, sale, service, and disposal. Users cover a broad spectrum, including component engineers, design engineers, program managers, commodity or cost management engineers, and buyers. PLM software tools enable all of those who are involved in the life of the product to access, communicate, and manage information about the product.

Agile 9.3’s new time-saving features are the result of two years spent researching, designing, and testing the product suite. Oracle’s User Experience (UX) team worked closely with users from several leading manufacturing companies in the high tech, life sciences, and consumer packaged goods industries to collect feedback and then improve on the designs for the Agile 9.3 release. Customers participated in site visits, usability testing, and one-on-one research. “The consistent involvement of customers throughout the project had a significant impact on the final product -- sometimes taking us in directions that we had not expected,” said Joel Nave, a Group Manager in Oracle’s User Experience team who guided the research and design of Agile 9.3.

The goals of boosting end user efficiency and accuracy in the upgraded Agile 9.3 meant:

• Introducing new learning aids


• Making the design consistent across all of the applications


• Reorganizing controls and visual elements to make navigation easier

“We simplified what was there before,” said Madhuri Kolhatkar, Director of Oracle’s Applications Unlimited User Experience team. ”In this case, less is more for our users. Now they don’t have to hunt for things.”

Video tours, shortcut cheat sheets, and standard messages were introduced to help users pick up on improvements more quickly. Another powerful new feature, Nave said, is the type-ahead suggestions for lists. It seems like a simple idea, he said, but users are finding that it’s a huge time-saver. “When we were doing our initial research, we realized how much time users spent selecting list values. They knew the value they wanted, but had to go through several steps and dialogs to select it. And it wasn’t only the steps that took time; waiting for a large list to load was time-consuming as well.” In Agile 9.3, users can simply begin typing, and this feature suggests text that the user can select from. What sometimes took 30 seconds before, now takes 3 or 4 seconds. “That feature really impacts time-on-task,” Nave said. “This is a big winner for end users.”

With just a few key strokes, users can prompt a feature that offers type-ahead suggestions for lists. It seems simple, but users who tested the new Agile 9.3 software said it saves them a lot of time.

The tables in the product suite have also undergone significant changes. Users can now add to a table using the type-ahead feature, drag objects onto the table, or paste copied values to the table. These features increase accuracy as well as efficiency. “Users are assured that when dragging or copying a number, they will definitely add the right item,” Nave said. Another improvement in the table is inline editing of the table itself. In previous releases of Agile, the user needed to select rows to edit, click on edit, input the new content, and save. Now, a user can simply click a cell, change the content, and save it.

Agile 9.3’s new inline table editing feature reduces the steps a user takes to change the contents of the table.

Two new features, QuickView and the Navigator, help reduce the need to navigate through pages. The QuickView feature allows users to view and take action on the primary content of an object, without having to navigate to the object itself. For example, if the user is viewing a Bill of Materials (BOM) and would like to add an attachment for an item in the BOM, the user can launch the QuickView for the item and add the attachment without having to navigate away from the BOM.

This screenshot shows what the new feature QuickView looks like in the upgraded Agile 9.3 software. The tool reduces navigation through several pages for users by allowing them to quickly view and take action on item content.

The Navigator feature allows users to move search results, BOM, and program structures to the left pane of their screen, and then navigate through the list and see details in the content area. For example, a user can move search results to the Navigator and then look through each result without having to move from a search-results page to the object and then back to the search results to view the next object. “The Navigator is another concept that has been well received,” Nave said.

Users will also see new keyboard shortcuts in the Agile 9.3 software, such as copy, paste, quick access to the Home page, and Custom Search.

The redesigned suite of applications includes Product Collaboration, Product Governance and Compliance, Product Quality Management, Product Cost Management, and Product Portfolio Management and Engineering Collaboration. Visit http://www.oracle.com/applications/agile/index.html for more information about the Agile 9.3 product suite.

Editor’s note: Dr. Sherry Mead is an expert in the user experience of search. This blog is the first of a two-part series on the latest user interface design for search functionality.

Sherry Mead, User Experience Architect

What Are Facets?

From Wikipedia: “A faceted classification system allows the assignment of multiple classifications to an object, enabling the classifications to be ordered in multiple ways, rather than in a single, pre-determined, taxonomic order. Each facet typically corresponds to the possible values of a property common to a set of digital objects.”

Facets are orthogonal categories or attributes used to filter a body of data. For example, shoes have type, heel height, color, and size attributes. Most shoppers are interested only in shoes of a certain size or color. A vendor may create a color facet with values such as black, brown, and red, and then enable users to filter the list of shoes to show only those having the desired value of color, such as black. Facets may also have dependencies. For example, shoes of type “athletic” do not have a heel-height facet.

The Flamenco Fine Arts Search is an example of a well-designed, faceted search user interface.

Are Facets Good for Business Users?

Facets have been popularized primarily by Internet retail sites. This post is about using facets to browse enterprise application data and other enterprise data sources, such as file servers and intranet sites.

Are Facets Good for Business Users?

Drupal.org lists a set of cases for which faceted search is likely to be appropriate:

• Users need to filter content using multiple taxonomy terms at the same time.


• Users want to combine text searches, taxonomy term filtering, and other search criteria.


• Users don't know precisely what they can find on your site, or what to search for.


• You want to hint at related content users might not have thought of looking for, but that could be of interest to them.


• You want to clearly show users what subject areas are the most comprehensive on your site.


• You are trying to discover relationships or trends between contents.


• Your site has too much content for it to be displayed through fixed navigational structures, but you still want it to be navigable.


• You want to use a faceted classification because a single taxonomic order or a single folksonomy is not suitable or sufficient for your content.


• Users often get empty result sets when searching your site.


• You think that "advanced" search forms are not fun to use.

All of the above are generally relevant to searching enterprise applications. Even enterprise users who are accustomed to advanced search forms, often with multiple required fields, tend to enter only one keyword in enterprise search UI’s. Facets allow them to specify very narrow search criteria to find the individual business objects that they are accustomed to working with.

Users, especially self-service users and new employees, are often not aware of everything available to them via the enterprise application suite. Facets can provide a wealth of information about the content available within the application suite and within other information sources in the enterprise, such as file servers and intranet sites.

It is well known that enterprise applications are at once very complex and very specific. Ask anyone who has tried to design an information architecture for an enterprise application suite. If you talk to users, they will tell you about the many times they have searched for enterprise application data and gotten no results.

Finally, facets can replace advanced search forms with a more pleasant, easy-to-use interface.

In Part 2, I will explain how to design and implement search user interfaces with facets.

Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience

Oracle’s Worklist features are being enhanced for the next generation of business enterprise software.

A Worklist describes tasks that require a manager or other employee to intervene and complete, says Carmen D’Arlach, a design architect for Oracle’s Analytics User Experience. A Worklist helps customers organize and route their tasks to the appropriate person within an organization, and tracks where tasks are as they move through a chain of participants. Customers most likely will use a Worklist to route approvals for documents such as expense reports or purchase requisitions. For example, based on who creates the expense report and how much it is for, the report might be routed to an employee in payroll for approval, and later to the company’s bank. The Worklist feature can take automatic action if the approval is not made in a timely fashion; for example, if the appropriate manager is traveling and has delegated the task to someone else.

Worklists were the subject of several usability tests during the iterative user interface design process, and the results informed multiple versions of its design. In upcoming generations of enterprise software, the Worklist may provide a notification for any business action, using any channel of communication, such as e-mail, SMS or fax. D’Arlach said most customers designate e-mail to receive notifications about tasks. Worklists will also enable customers to take action on tasks through e-mail. Approve/reject buttons will be provided to help manage information about each task, and the online version of the task will always be accessible through e-mail in case a more complex action is needed. Using Worklists in this way allows customers to spend less time navigating between documents and other applications.

The Worklist will also be available as a desktop widget in the next generation of enterprise software. The widget, a small screen that pops up on a customer’s desktop, provides fast access to prioritized tasks that may need immediate attention. Based on workflows and routing rules, the Worklist can show managers what tasks are assigned to whom in the chain of command, and where they are in the process, D’Arlach said.

The straightforward presentation of tasks in the Worklist allows users to make decisions quickly when approving expenses, vacations, or hiring; when reviewing documents or proposals; and when managing tasks with updates, attaching documents or rerouting work to another employee.

This screenshot offers a look at the full list page of the Worklist in E-Business Suite, which is the basis for the Worklist in upcoming generations of Oracle enterprise software. At a glance, users can see their list of tasks, when the task was sent, when it is due, and the current status of the task. Click here to view image detail

Anna Wichansky, Senior Director, Applications User Experience and Chair, Oracle Usability Advisory Board

On March 30-31, 2009, we celebrated the first anniversary of founding the Oracle Usability Advisory Board by having a strategic meeting in the Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores. One year of active participation by our very best customers yielded many examples of sharing and trust at the behest of improving user experiences. Oracle provided information and strategy for future enterprise software technology and products, including:

• collaboration software

• business intelligence

• next generation applications

• applications integration

• service oriented architectures

• business process development tools

• accessibility

Customers brought their issues lists on current application offerings, including PeopleSoft and E-Business Suite platforms. It was time to discuss the question for which we founded the board: what is the next level of enterprise software usability?

Board members had a prework assignment to discuss this very question with their organizational colleagues and to come prepared to have an active session in their working groups. Here is some of what they said:

• The next level of enterprise software should provide a consumer-level user   experience. Customers wanted software that was similar to Amazon and   Google in user experience style and complexity.

• It should have a collaborative workspace, to take advantage of the wisdom of   the Internet community. Customers believe there is significant value in   accessing “group-think”, within and possibly beyond their organizations.

• Work processes should be configurable by non-technical users. There is
  significant interest in business process modeling tools which could be
  used by subject matter experts.

• It should provide dynamic dashboards rather than just static reports. While   some customers felt there was a large cultural investment in static reports,   others said the next generation software would no longer emphasize printed   reports.

• It should provide real-time data. Customers were not satisfied seeing Web   sites with data “as of 46 minutes ago.”

• It should solve the pain of upgrades. Customers debated the costs and   benefits of Software as a Service (SaaS). While all users automatically get   upgrades and improvements at the same time in this model, it can also   blow away customizations and cause training headaches.

• The help system should be highly contextual. They wanted enhancements   such as user-added content and User Productivity Kit (UPK) videos.

• It should be usable with no training at all, or with a significant reduction in   training from today’s offerings. Some customers said this about current   professional enterprise applications, such as financials. Training should be   more about domain-level tasks, and less about the software itself.

One outcome of this exercise is consistent with my past research: when we ask customers what the next generation of products should look like, they typically describe the last generation of products we designed. I used to believe this was because customers were just reflecting what they had in their hands today. However, our customers are pretty savvy, and I think there is more to it than that. We may have designed something into the product that could not be built, based on resources, schedule, or technology limitations. Or, we may have put in a feature that performs that function, but the customer just did not “get it” in the last rendition. Maybe their implementation was not configured to take advantage of that feature. Or, it may have appeared after the system was purchased as an upgrade or enhancement that the customer was not aware of.

It is clear that we in the enterprise software business have our work cut out for us. Customers are better informed and more knowledgeable about the user experience than ever before. If enterprise software companies think they are satisfying their customers with the features of current product offerings, customers may have a different perception. In all user interface work, the devil is in the details. If the design or implementation obscures a functional solution to a customer problem, the customer may not perceive that a solution is really in there at all.

For more information on how to become an Oracle Usability Advisory Board member, click here.

Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience

The redesigned Remote Data Capture 4.5.3 application, for Oracle’s customers in the pharmaceutical world, is already making clinical trials easier for investigators around the globe. That’s because key customers, stakeholders in pharmaceutical companies, had a hand in deciding just how the new application would work best.

The software is used by investigators, often physicians, who collect data on patients in pharmaceutical clinical trials as they test new drugs. Earlier generations of the application were slow and could be difficult to use. They required plug-in applications for PDFs, which take time to launch. Investigators who might need to travel between a hospital and a clinic, for example, found earlier generations of the application cumbersome, and they needed to be able to access patient data more easily.

“We worked with the usability team and the customers to take a step back and get a fresh perspective on the whole business process around investigators entering data about subjects for a clinical trial,” said Greg Jones, Vice President of Applications Development in Oracle’s Health Sciences Global Business Unit (HSGBU). “By taking that step, and taking the business process focus, we were able to design and develop a much improved data experience for the investigator. This is a tool that they can really use.”

“The presentation of the data on the screen needs to be very straightforward and intuitive in clinical trials,” said Michele Becci, the Senior Director of Global Strategic Accounts in HSGBU. So making usability the No. 1 issue, she said, and focusing on productivity, ease of use and efficiency, helped steer the redesign in the right direction.

Image 1. The newly redesigned Remote Data Capture 4.5.3, which is used in clinical trials by pharmaceutical companies, allows physicians conducting the trials to manipulate data more easily. Previous generations of the application used a slow-moving PDF that required a plug-in application. The new version of RDC features small menus easily accessible by right-clicking on the mouse, such as the one in the top left above. Physicians can also call up data by specific categories, such as Year Diagnosed, as shown in the menu on the right. Click here to view image detail

Members of the user experience (UX) team conducted several tests on new prototypes as the months-long redesign took place, which allowed Oracle’s teams to fine-tune the application and ensure that RDC 4.5.3 went beyond a simple new icon or two. The results were that the application’s look and feel improved, and the application became easier to use, Becci said. Very little training is needed to use RDC 4.5.3, and the overall satisfaction with the application has certainly improved. “It’s been very, very well received by customers,” she said.

One of the most important solutions to come out of the redesign was dropping the need for the plug-in application. Older generations of RDC had a poor work flow, and entering a patient’s data was not integrated well with other parts of the application, according to Kailash Dattkaya, an interaction designer and manager who worked on the redesign of RDC. Eliminating the need for a plug-in went a long way in boosting the speed of RDC, improving the ease-of-use and increasing productivity for users.

Investigators and auditors, who review the work of the trial investigators, are now able to interact with RDC 4.5.3’s data entry programs, even expanding what they can view with drill-down pages or calling up specific data columns for a side-by-side comparison, instead of toggling back and forth or opening up multiple screens. Key actions on the tool bar are easier to reach, terminology has been changed so that users have a clearer picture of what they need to do to accomplish their tasks, and the task flow of the application has been redesigned.

“RDC is optimized for investigators – that was our challenge, to make sure we delivered a great product so that pharmaceutical organizations could offer a great tool for investigators to use in their studies,” Jones said. “We were able to design and develop a better data collection experience for the investigator, an application or tool that the investigators could really use.”

“It was clear that customers were very happy with the solutions that we built,” said Madhuri Kolhatkar, Director of Oracle’s Applications Unlimited User Experience team. “We showed the health sciences sector that a good user experience can really make a difference to the product. “

Laurie Pattison, Senior Director, User Experience, Oracle

In my travels and conversations with other UX professionals, it seems that no matter what interesting design or research topic we’re discussing, there’s always a point in the conversation when the subject moves from the actual topic to how to deliver it given organizational structure or dynamics. There are a lot of talented and visionary designers and researchers out there, but not all of them have been able to achieve a seat at the strategy table of their organizations, or those for whom they contract.

It’s definitely not a new problem, nor one that hasn’t been discussed. Jim Nieters from Yahoo and I shared some of our ideas in UX Matters last year. Richard Anderson hosted a panel in 2007 with various executives asking the same question.

Is there a magic bullet to gain strategic relevance as a User Experience organization? A common question asked of successful UX leaders is what “one thing” they did to move their organizations into a position of strategic relevance. However, there are often as many answers as questions, which certainly can pose a challenge to those struggling to figure out how to achieve the same goal where they work.

At CHI 2009 in Boston, I’m joining some learned colleagues on a panel to make our case for the "one thing" we believe can make all the difference. We will also analyze a variety of scenarios from different companies in an attempt to predict the "one thing" needed in each case. We will attempt to elucidate key aspects of the scenarios and the process of analysis to help audience members “figure out how to figure out” the "one thing" that is likely to work in their own situations.

Are you trying to figure out what one thing you need to attend to in order for UX to gain a seat at the strategy table with business and engineering? If so, let us know -- tell us about your work situation, and we'll look into including it among the scenarios to be analyzed by the panelists. Alternatively, if you feel that you’ve discovered the one thing that makes all the difference, let us know by commenting on this blog. Alternatively, if you’re on Facebook, take our short survey.

Note that we'll also be addressing a mix of related questions, such as what makes a good "one thing". Can there really be only "one thing”, and just how useful can the analysis attempted during the session be. It promises to be an interesting session. We hope to see you there.

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.

Alisa Hamai, Usability Engineer and Co-Chair, Oracle Usability Advisory Board

On a snowy night on December 8, 2008, Oracle hosted a lovely Italian dinner for our Usability Advisory Board at the II Fornaio Restaurant in Denver, Colorado.

A total of 13 customers attended the Usability Advisory Board meeting at Oracle’s Denver campus the next day. The theme of this meeting was Enterprise Applications for Mobile Devices.

Below are some key highlights worth sharing:

Oracle has already developed mobile solutions for enterprise users, as seen in their Oracle Business Indicators. Oracle Business Indicators are task-focused applications, which allows secure access to business information on the go (for example, performance indicators, contact information, and sales data). These applications also allow executives to respond quickly and easily to common tasks (for example, approvals for hires, expenses, and purchases). Additionally, users will have access to comprehensive predefined metrics and reports delivered from Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, including financial, human resources, supply chain, and customer relationship management analytics. The user experience in this interface is superior and noteworthy: it has flexible and intuitive browsing and keyword/wildcard searches in the catalog. Frequently-accessed metrics reports can be saved to a Favorites list. Users easily zoom in and out of report details via the iPhone multi-touch (or “pinch”) technology. The applications also have timely alerts, which allow Sales Managers and Field Managers to enable immediate actions when they are away from the office.

Oracle Business Approvals for Apple iPhone is coming for Expense, HR Job Offer, and Purchase Requisition. Managers and executives are the target audience. Key features include: optimization for superior usability on iPhone; access to Oracle Business Indicator Apps prebuilt Analytics; and leverage of Oracle SOA/BPEL technology.

Image 1. Oracle Business Indicators for Apple iPhone.

Image 2. Presentation: Enterprise Applications for Mobile Devices (Lenley Hensarling, Group Vice President, EnterpriseOne, Oracle).

Customers participated in a focus group on mobile applications, which was a follow-up to an online survey conducted prior to the meeting. Topics discussed included: why mobile is important, and what is “mobility” (“It’s getting people on the move and getting apps on mobile devices.”). The Mobile Solutions for Applications Unlimited Team has been designing user experiences for Oracle’s new Application Unlimited products, such as Business Intelligence (OBIEE), CRM On Demand, and Life Sciences. Oracle created a task-focused application with business indicators for the iPhone and Blackberry to help sales people and managers be more productive in their jobs. The team has been busy working jointly with the Mobile Applications Team to gather user research on enterprise needs of our customers. Oracle obtained customer feedback and incorporated the feedback into their designs.

Mobile Solutions out in the market today include: CRM On Demand Mobile Assistant and Mobile Sales Forecast for the iPhone and Blackberry; Business Intelligence Indicators for the iPhone; and Business Approvals Applications for Managers and Sales Managers for the iPhone.

Customers expressed interest in the CRM On Demand Mobile Sales Assistant, and which version of CRM On Demand is supported. Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant requires Oracle CRM On Demand Release 15 or above.

The Mobile User Experience Team conducted ethnographic research in three countries (USA, India, and Singapore) and observed mobile users. They wanted to know “in what ways mobile devices support enterprise mobile workers day-to-day, worldwide.” A few interesting observations from their research include:

• People own multiple mobile devices (2, 3, 4 devices)
• SMS (IM) has lots of uses (for example, inspirational notes to employees)
• People use USB or Bluetooth connectivity to send or transfer documents

Image 3. Plenary Working Group on Mobile User Experience (left to right: Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo, Senior Manager, Mobile User Experience, Oracle and Madhuri Kolhatkar, Director, Applications Unlimited & Industry Solutions User Experience, Oracle).

Future Programs for 2009: One of the take-aways from the group discussion is that customers wanted a two-day meeting to cover all the meeting topics. Additionally, a few customers welcomed hosting a board meeting at their location.

Figure 4: Anna Wichansky, Senior Director & Chair, Oracle Usability Advisory Board.

Our next board meeting is scheduled for March 30-31, 2009, at Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores. ]]> http://blogs.oracle.com/usableapps/2009/02/customer-advisory-board-brains.html http://blogs.oracle.com/usableapps/2009/02/customer-advisory-board-brains.html Fri, 27 Feb 2009 07:41:30 -0800

George Hackman, Senior Director, Applications User Experience

Design patterns have been around since the 1960’s as a way of bringing commonly established best practices to architecture. Christopher Alexander wrote a book on architectural patterns that shows common ways of organizing and designing physical spaces ranging from parks to children’s bedrooms. It is a classic and a very good read, even for non- architects. Stemming from these architectural patterns, software code patterns took off as a way of providing high level solutions to common software problems.

User Interface (UI) Patterns are reusable building blocks that allow the business analyst, product manager, or developer to quickly and consistently put together user interfaces. Instead of architecting from scratch, developers can leverage these patterns to design quality UIs with limited resources.

If we start with the reusable high-level building blocks when putting together our applications, we get UI consistency and code reuse for these large chunks of our application. Then, we focus our creative juices and design talent on the parts of the applications that need to be unique. As an added bonus, we save teams a lot of time searching through lower- level UI guidelines as they try to piece components together.

Patterns at Oracle

Oracle has built a library containing more than 100 UI design patterns. These range from simple operations, like drilling into detail, to more complex interfaces for hierarchies, searching, and analytics.

Figure 1. A drill- to- detail pattern

The key components of Alexander’s architectural patterns (problem, context, and solution), still ring true for UI design patterns. You need to know your users and how they are using the product to pick the best pattern for the job. One of the tough jobs in creating a pattern set is making it easy for developers to pick the right pattern. We spent a huge amount of time creating organizational schemas, search mechanisms, and decision support tools for our patterns.

An example of a decision support tool is the Design Filter Tool or DeFT. This allows a designer to easily filter patterns by checking boxes for the user type (context) and task (problem).

Figure 2. The Design Pattern Filter Tool (DeFT)

Oracle has used patterns extensively in the building of next generation applications. We started with them during the design phase as wireframe and prototype templates. Then as coding started they were translated into Java code templates and development guides that the developers could use to build the product. The patterns have fulfilled their promise of making it easy to design and code in a consistent way to increase designer and developer productivity.

It’s easy to find good UI patterns on the web and in books. Here are a couple of good references.

Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design by Jennifer Tidwell.

The Design of Sites, Douglas K. van Duyne, James A. Landay and Jason I. Hong

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series) , Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein

John Cartan, User Experience Architect, Applications User Experience

After thirty years of pointing and clicking, human computer interaction is entering a new phase. Input methods are becoming more sophisticated and flexible (multi-touch, touchless, tactile, audio). At the same time, output methods are becoming both bigger (surface displays, electronic whiteboards) and smaller (smart phones, head-mounted displays, flexible plastic displays).

Though these innovations usually first catch on in the consumer marketplace, it’s just a matter of time before they are adopted at the enterprise level. Each new input/output combination (iPhone, Wii) creates new implications for user interface design. At Oracle, we are trying to understand these implications and prepare for them.

A finger tends to be less precise than a mouse, so we may need more focused screen layouts with fewer, bigger, and more widely-spaced buttons. Mouse-optimized controls like drop-down fields may need to be replaced with finger-optimized controls like animated spin wheels. Or better yet: allow dynamic target resizing – temporarily magnifying the part of a screen the user is looking at or reaching for.

Display size creates new challenges, whether big or small. Small screens may require built-in panning and zooming along with task flows that focus on one thing at a time.
Big screens require new ways to keep controls always within reach and readable whether up close or far away, and must display more information without overwhelming users.

Display size also creates fundamentally new kinds of interaction. Small devices are highly mobile and can respond to their changing location and orientation to become context aware. They can automatically switch from touch input to speech recognition when held near the user’s ear or reconfigure choices based on the device’s location or the detection of nearby objects.

Big screens create the possibility of truly collaborative multi-user interactions. This will require the UI to resolve who is doing what and provide new paradigms to establish and release control. Updates, undos and submits will become trickier. Task flows that work at a desk may not work when standing in a crowd. Public interactions can create more time pressure and less tolerance for errors and side-trips. Users can stand up and walk away, and need ways to effortlessly pass control and access privileges.

The richer set of gestures made possible by multi-touch inputs has already spurred new interactions like stretching, rotating, and flicking. Users can convey more information with each gesture and expect the UI to respond appropriately. In particular, users expect that natural inputs will produce natural reactions: natural motions when dragging or tossing objects, and scrolling that accelerates and bounces. We are learning how to embed richer, more realistic animations into our applications.

Multi-touch inputs may soon be superseded by touchless 3-D gesturing in both large and small devices. As we move toward ever more natural and immersive interactions, meaning will start to be encoded in gestures instead of controls. Instead of pointing to a button on the screen which represents some predefined action, users could make an “OK” sign to approve, cross their fingers to delete, or clap their hands to submit. 3-D gestures will spur 3-D UIs: new forms of navigation that employ the Z axis, or the ability to fold or bunch-up tables.

Once users are given new ways of expressing their intent, computer UIs must inevitably provide new ways of responding. The mouse was initially dismissed as a toy but soon gave rise to windows, buttons, and icons on every business desktop. As users cut their mouse cords and step away from their desks, UIs must again respond. Within a few years, even enterprise UIs may be as different from today’s GUIs as GUIs were different from green-screen command-line interfaces.

Image 1. Gesture-based interactions create new possibilities.

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.

Eva Gaumond, Senior Principal Usability Engineer, CRM and Enabling Technologies

Introduction

Successful sales people know how to get the right product information to the right customer at the right time. Staying up-to-date with their company’s offerings while building and maintaining strong customer relationships requires both a focus on details and the ability to see the big picture at the same time. Efficient tracking and management of all the steps in the sales process can be overwhelming. Enter Oracle’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, an invaluable tool that facilitates selling from initial sales prospecting to the all-important closing of the deal.

To design great applications, we have to watch, talk to, listen to, and interact with end users. At Oracle, we use a myriad of usability techniques to understand our users. Sales people are a particularly intriguing group to work with. They are extremely results driven: their performance is measured almost entirely by their sales. Naturally, sales reps want to spend their time selling. Time is money to these folks, and getting on their calendar to conduct user research means convincing them that the time they give will ultimately result in improvements that will help them sell more. Fortunately, sales professionals tend to be adept at vocalizing their opinions and reactions, a characteristic prized by usability professionals.

The following methods proved to be valuable in our process:

Surveying the landscape: CRM applications have been around for a while, which means that there are a lot of people out there with real-world experience using the products we make at Oracle, as well as those products made by our competition. We interviewed our own customers, as well as our competitors, in order to assess how our CRM offerings stack up against the competition. Known as a “Comparative Analysis”, what we learned is helping us ensure that we continue to offer CRM products that meet the evolving needs of our customers.

Asking them what they want: CRM users know what they have now, and they know what’s working for them and what’s not. But what do they want to see in the future? How can we enhance what they already have? Again, we asked Oracle and non-Oracle CRM users directly. We conducted a “Wants & Needs” session with sales reps who use CRM products from multiple vendors to help understand the demands of hectic schedules and information overload.

“Traditional” usability studies: With state-of-the-art usability labs at Oracle, we let the reps get hands-on the software. How well did our designs for the next generation of CRM software support our users tasks and goals? Here’s what we found out: as it turns out, some of our new concepts worked very well, such as the overall design paradigm—meaning the way the data is organized and how users navigate within the system. So, we knew we were on the right track at a global level. At the same time, we found some things that worked less well. For example, we learned that in some places, users needed to scroll in order to see important buttons. Depending on what their goal was, if the user did not scroll, they might not be able to complete the task. By identifying these kinds of issues early, we can refine the UI design long before an application is released.

Getting out in the field: Sales people spend a lot of time “out there” on the road. Ultimately, any kind of ethnographic research or contextual observation or inquiry requires usability professionals to get out there with them, learning how they do their jobs without getting in the way. Oracle has sent usability professionals all over the world to do just that.

Now What?

So, what have we learned from all this research? Well, lots of things about the information and communication needs of sales professionals: how they work, where they work, and what they need to close the deal. The data we’ve gathered has strongly influenced our designs. Because time is precious to sales professionals, user adoption of a CRM application is driven by its usability and usefulness. If a CRM application is easy to use and enables sales people to increase sales, they will embrace it. At Oracle, we are making sure that our CRM software is designed to support sales professionals by keeping them involved in the design process every step of the way.

Misha Vaughan, Architect, Applications User Experience

Ed Abbo (Oracle Senior Vice President, Applications Development) spoke at an Applications General Session on business-driven innovation and user-driven innovation. On the subject of business-driven innovation, Ed, along with Melissa Boxer (Oracle Vice President, Marketing and Loyalty), demonstrated some innovative user experiences on a mobile device.

Ed and Melissa (Image 1) discussed how Oracle is helping L’Oréal with the rollout of Siebel Loyalty for L’Oréal’s Body Shop brand. As part of the project, they are also helping L’Oréal transition to new channels such as the mobile phone and implement the concept of communities. As an example, Melissa demonstrated a concept project showcasing a social networking application, which she dubbed “a smart loyalty solution for the iPhone.” On a mobile device, the application enabled a user who was part of a Body Shop “inner circle,” or club, to find information about products and their club status in real time – for example, while browsing a shop.

Image 1. Melissa Boxer with Ed Abbo demonstrating a concept application for L’Oréal on the iPhone.

Specifically on User Innovation…

User-driven innovations were discussed in the second part of Ed’s message. He defined this as productive and innovative user experiences for Applications Unlimited.

“We are looking at how users work and delivering to them the information technology that enables that [work]. We focused very heavily on alternate user experiences and alternate UIs [user interfaces].”

“If a user uses Google, for example, we’ve made our enterprise data available to them through that interface. If they want to use a widget and gadget rather than launch the full application to look at sales, their customers, or their service request, they can do that.”

“We are also taking the [CRM] productivity applications we announced last year and enabling them with collaborative social networking capabilities.”

Anthony Lye (Oracle SVP, Customer Relationship Management) also took the stage with Ed to demo some of the same CRM productivity applications, including Sales Prospector and Sales Presentation Library (Images 2 and 3).

Image 2. Anthony Lye an Ed Abbo announcing the introduction of a social CRM platform.

Image 3. A Demo of Oracle Sales Prospector mashing up ERP and CRM data along with social networking (Anthony Lye, left, and Ed Abbo, right).

Also on Monday, Jeremy Ashley (Oracle Vice President, Applications User Experience) (Image 4) gave a presentation on “User Experience Innovations,” covering some user experience concepts for Applications Unlimited, along with a sneak peak at some Fusion concepts. He described the Applications User Exerience customer research process (Image 5).

Image 4. Jeremy Ashley on Applications User Experience Innovations at Oracle OpenWorld.

Image 5. Oracle Applications User Experience user research process.

The Applications Unlimited portion of the presentation covered the following areas derived from working with customers:

     • Improving user productivity
     • Improving user performance
     • Decreasing cost of ownership for customers
     • Providing productivity tools

Jeremy talked in-depth about user experience improvements in Peoplesoft 9.1 HCM, Siebel 8.1.1 E-Commerce, Oracle Clinical Remote Data Capture 4.5.3, JDE EnterpriseOne 9.0, and Global Mobile Applications (including the iPhone and Mobile Sales Assistant).

In the innovation category, Patanjali Venkatacharya (Oracle Architect, Applications User Experience ) talked about the impact of Gen Y and the changing workforce, and what this means for enterprise applications. The key takeaway was that Gen Y users are likely to have expectations that are set by their current Internet experience, for example:

     • The ease of Google-like searches
     • The prevalence of wiki pages and blogs
     • Media sharing on cell phones and YouTube
     • Social networking of sites like MySpace and LinkedIn

Some interesting food for thought.

Fusion Edition: Key User Interface Concepts

On Wednesday, Steve Miranda (Oracle Senior Vice President, Applications Development) (Image 6) discussed “Oracle Fusion Applications: Applications for the Next-Generation Organization Part 1” and Chris Leone (Oracle Group Vice President, Applications Strategy) presented “Part 2.”

Image 6. Steve Miranda talking with audience members at the “Oracle Fusion Applications” presentation .

Other blogs captured the salient points and photos. Jim Holincheck's blog summarized the key design points nicely. They are:

     • Role-based dashboards
     • Embedded analytics
     • Integrated visualization
     • Worklists
     • Activity guides
     • Desktop widgets
     • Contextual help with user ratings
     • Tagging
     • Presence
     • Communities/business social networks
     • Accordion panels (left-hand and right-hand panels that can be
       expanded and contracted)
     • Show more/show less (ability to configure a more detailed vs. less                    detailed version of the screen)

For a slideshow, check out Floyd Teter’s photos, (writer of ORCLVILLE).

Editor’s Note:Oracle OpenWorld 2008: Applications User Experience Highlights - Part 2 will appear non-sequentially in the next few weeks.

Author: Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo, Senior Manager - Oracle Applications User Experience

Mobile communication and information devices have been evolving with recent improvements in battery life, security, device management, and memory bandwidth. New applications have exploded into the marketplace, enabling individuals to pick and choose applications that fit their social, information, and personal needs. In addition, there has been a blending of work and personal life, where access to both business and personal applications can happen in any environment at any time. It has become increasingly important to better understand how the mobile workforce responds to the current mobile environment, and to understand how they are using mobile devices, in which contexts, and how they may be using such technologies in unanticipated ways.

As part of a comprehensive user-centered design strategy, the Oracle Mobile User Experience team aims to understand as much as possible about enterprise mobile users. To do this, we decided to conduct in-depth ethnographic research with mobile workers to thoroughly understand the mobile workforce environment, so that we can point the way to new applications and user experiences for the mobile business user.

Mobile behaviors are not easily self-reported, because they are opportunistic in nature (that is, mobile tasks are completed when convenient). Mobile behaviors are also often unexpected or unplanned by the user (for example, an urgent response needed to an email or a phone call from Mom). Therefore, the issues to be explored are contextual and are rooted in behavior.Field studies are more than simple observations; they are an exploration of meaning. The core of most ethnographic work is based on observation, interaction, and documentation.

Research was conducted in Singapore, India, and the U.S. to ensure a representation of mobile trends and user types across technologically advanced cultures, diverse mobile workforces, and emerging markets. Our approach was to take an in-depth look into a cross-section of users and understand their mobile usage, needs, and wants through interviews and observation of their day-to-day interactions at work and outside of the office. The sessions lasted about five hours and gave us the chance to intimately participate in a user’s day. During that timeframe, we spent about 30 minutes to get to know and form a rapport with the participant, then we observed them as they completed their work and daily tasks for approximately three hours. We concluded with a one-hour post-observational interview to follow up on observations and catch any details we may have missed earlier. Paired teams of researchers conducted this research.

From April to May, 2008, we conducted 33 ethnographic interviews with experienced users of mobile devices (for example, cell phones, PDAs, or other such technologies) who use their devices in both their work and personal life. Thanks to the efforts of our internal recruiting team, the interviews included 10 participants in India, 13 participants in Singapore, and 10 participants in the U.S. (a mixture of mobile users from New York and San Francisco). The people we talked to ranged from tech-savvy “mobile-philes” to those who only used basic phone features. The participants represented a wide range of fields and walks of life, including financial, pharmaceutical, general sales, field service, retail merchandising, manufacturing, portfolio management, media and entertainment, and college students.

In addition to our in-depth observation sessions, we also conducted a number of “guerilla” or “on-the-street” techniques to enhance our cultural experiences. We took pictures of billboards, collected magazines and mobile marketing brochures, conducted approximately 100 “on the spot” surveys with mobile users, and interviewed employees from mobile phone shops and service providers. No one was safe from our inquisition.

To describe what we learned and experienced, each member of the research team created a blog to share their story that captures the stimulation of senses, the cultures, the mobile worker, the personal side of mobile, and our observations. In this article, we present portions of each of the blogs to give you a taste of what happened while we were on the road and to highlight some of the insights in each of these abbreviated blogs. Please enjoy!

Team Findings - Excerpts from other team member blogs