Usable Apps Blog

Is There a Touch Screen in the Future of Enterprise Applications?

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:34:48 -0800

Authors: Misha Vaughan and Karl Mochel, User Experience Architects, Oracle Applications User Experience

(Editor's note: The authors would like your feedback on the following topic. Please respond using the Post a Comment form at the end of the blog.)

Are your end users already moving to the latest in touch technology, the iPhone?

From Top Tech News

“The launch of the first iPhone model a year ago boosted interest in the technology tremendously, and the updated model available Friday likely will stoke enthusiasm further. Now touch-screen manufacturers are going flat out, and more devices will soon be controlled by the tip of your finger.”

• Do enterprise applications need to respond to this new technology? If so, how?
• Would your mobile sales force be willing to begin using yet one more new technology?
• How would your shop floor manufacturing processes change with touch technology?
• What challenges would your users face if they were entering an expense report on a mobile phone?

We look forward to your comments!

Design Matters - Seven Design Principles, Part III

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:34:20 -0800

Author: Douglas K. van Duyne, Principal, Naviscent LLC

(Editor's note: Douglas van Duyne is a principal at Naviscent LLC, which recently partnered with Oracle in the design of future Applications user interfaces, and is lead author of The Design of Sites (2003). I invited Doug to contribute a multipart blog describing the process he uses to design the user experience. This is the second of three blogs which will appear monthly in this space.)

We continue with design principles to make Web sites easier to use. Our first principle was to make Web sites consistent, in terms of architecture, interaction, appearance, and terminology. Our second, third, and fourth principles involved:
offering informative feedback, recognition vs. recall, and error recovery. Our fifth, sixth, and seventh principles are discussed here.

5. Support Customer Control and Freedom

Customers may come to your Web site for many reasons – for information, products, or activities, for example. One customer may know exactly what she is looking for, while another may have only a vague notion of what she wants and will browse the site to see what catches her eye. Make sure that you build easy exits into your design for people who like to browse. For example, include undo and redo options for mistaken choices or breadcrumbs that demonstrate the user’s current location, as shown in the following example.

The area at the top of this Web page enclosed by the dashed line shows location breadcrumbs, which identify where customers are on the Web site. Breadcrumbs also provide a quick way of backtracking to previously viewed pages.

Give customers the impression that they aren’t being forced to follow a fixed path and that their actions determine the site’s responses. You can achieve this impression by providing multiple ways to navigate the Web site.

• Impulse and Intention Drive Customers to Act – Understand what drives your customers to take particular actions online. Your customers may come to your site for a specific task, or just to look around. Once at your Web site, customers may navigate based on things that grab their interest. These observations indicate two things that drive customers to action: impulse and intention. Build these two actions into your Web site design. A Web site that doesn’t include intention-based navigation might feel a bit quirky, and a site that omits impulse-based navigation might be perceived as boring.

Two kinds of motivation drive customers to act: intention and impulse. Your customers’ histories and attitudes form their goals and triggers, from which they take action and assess their satisfaction. This experience feeds back into their histories and starts the loop all over again.

• Different Motivations Lead to Different Styles of Navigation – Utilize common navigational methods to make your Web site feel familiar to the customers who visit. Include methods such as searching, browsing, and wizard-style navigation for customers who are looking for specific items. For customers who are impulse buyers, include links to featured products and links to cross-sell items.

• Put Tools Where Customers Will Find and Use Them – Upon opening a Web site, customers want to quickly find the links that will enable them to achieve their goals. Place the searching and browsing tools near the point where customers will begin reading (usually near the top right of the page), so that they are not forced to scroll to find them. This location will help customers find and use the tools. Place impulse navigation tools at the bottom of the page, or in a lower position on the right side of the page.

By giving your visitors multiple ways to navigate on your site, depending on their goals and desires, you can keep them engaged.

6. Help Frequent Customers Use Accelerators

Frequent customers to Web sites have come to expect keyboard shortcuts that support common actions automatically. For example, you might design your Web site to support the storage of customer information, such as shipping addresses, and use predictive input to save customers from retyping the same information each time they return to a page.

Predictive input improves speed and accuracy of data input and is a great tool to use with forms to encourage people to complete them. You can implement predictive input in several ways.

• Provide basic predictive input when typing within a pick list – This is a common method. Rather than scroll through a long list of options to make a selection, the customer types a letter and the list jumps to the first option beginning with that letter.

• Use predictive text input to help speed entry – This method uses automatic suggestions to help reduce the typing required for a customer to complete a form. The customer can choose one of the predefined options in a list or can begin typing an entry to reduce the list to the options beginning with the specified text.

• Load predictive text input with the page –The site designer can supply preloaded options, or the browser software can compile predictive text from customer responses to the same questions on previous visits and then store those responses in a cookie.

• Provide multiple selection methods – This method enables customers to select an option from a pick list using either the keyboard or the mouse. However, make sure that you include control over the function of the Enter key when designing such a page. You must decide whether you want the Enter key to insert the selected option into the field, or submit the entire form to the server.

Predictive input makes it more likely that your customers will complete forms quickly and accurately.

7. Strive for Aesthetic and Minimalist Design

Too many graphics and irrelevant information can make a Web site look cluttered and might be confusing to the customer. Clean aesthetics make the customers’ experiences more enjoyable. Web designers often overuse visual elements. If taking out a specific element causes no harm to the Web site, then remove the element from your Web pages. Every unnecessary element detracts from the elements that are important.

One Final Note

These seven principles sometimes conflict with one another. Use your best judgment to resolve these issues. There are instances where restricting control and freedom can help customers to complete their intended tasks. However, be judicious in using these types of restrictions to prevent customer frustration.

Reference:

Van Duyne, D.K, Landay, J.A, and Hong, J.I. (2003) The Design of Sites. Boston: Addison-Wesley.

Measuring User Productivity

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:23:23 -0800

Authors: Jeff Sauro, Principal Usability Engineer - Oracle Applications User Experience and Joe Dumas, Senior Usability Consultant - Oracle Applications User Experience

(Editor's note: Jeff Sauro and Joe Dumas, industry experts in measuring usability, usually publish their findings in journals of human-computer interaction. I invited them to share the results of their latest study with customers on this blog.)

Does a new user-interface design make its users more productive? That is a question often asked in the software industry, but that is seldom answered satisfactorily. The reason is the difficulty of finding metrics that measure user productivity. Enhancing the productivity of enterprise software means helping its users get more work done in a unit of time. Productivity is only one component of ease-of-use of a product, but an important one that has to be measured with an experienced user.

We know how to measure the usability of products. But one common measurement of usability, the usability test, is heavily weighted toward ease-of-learning, that is, performance and user satisfaction during the first few times a new product is used. After those first few trials, productivity is just beginning. From that point on, it's the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of trials that make users more or less productive. A successful product must have high usability, but it should also enable users to accomplish work faster over the life of the product. Productivity is one component of usability and is best measured after the first exposure to an application.

The figure below shows the mean performance time of a task for first, second, and third usage of two applications. The initial use would be characterized as measuring ease-of-learning the user getting acquainted with the interface; whereas each subsequent use becomes a better measure of productivity (ease-of-use). Application B has a steeper learning curve compared to Application A, but after some exposure, the difference between the products narrows and stabilizes.

Learning curves for two applications: The dots represent the mean time to complete a task in an expense reporting application. The gap in completion time between applications narrows and stabilizes as users become more familiar with the interface.

We are exploring a metric that has the potential to measure the user productivity of Oracle products. It's called Keystroke Level Modeling (KLM) and was created more than 20 years ago by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Xerox PARC.

With KLM, each user action is assigned a standard time. For example, clicking on a button with a mouse takes 230 milliseconds, and moving your hand from the mouse to the keyboard takes 360 milliseconds (1000 milliseconds is equal to 1 second.). There also are standard times for mental operations. For example, locating the right icon in a toolbar takes 1350 milliseconds. The times for many activities have been standardized by taking the average time from trials from many experienced users. Furthermore, times for new activities can be standardized in the same way.

With KLM, the estimated time to complete a task can be obtained by determining every step needed to complete it successfully and then adding up the standard times for all of the steps. The total should be an estimate of the time it will take an experienced user to complete the task. But does it? While there have been dozens of published studies showing that KLM can predict time within 10%-30% of actual user time, there are few examples of its usage in the fast-pace nature of commercial software development.

To test its efficacy on our own products, we conducted a study at Oracle's Denver Usability Lab. First, we did a KLM analysis of two different expense reporting applications. We selected five common tasks that both applications allow, for example creating a report to claim travel expenses. We found that over the five tasks, the total predicted task time was 4.5 minutes for application A, and 6.4 minutes for application B. Consequently, the KLM analysis predicts that application A will allow users to be approximately 29% faster and, therefore, more productive (see below).

Comparison between predicted task time (KLM) and actual task time from two expense reporting applications.

Next, we recruited 26 people who submit expense reports (about half with experience with the products and half without experience). We trained them on each application and then had them perform the same five tasks for three errorless trials with both applications. The results showed that their average time on the third errorless trial was 4.8 minutes for application A and 7.3 minutes for application B. The users average time was within 5% and 12% of the KLM time for both applications, respectively. The estimate of being 29% more productive with application A was within 5 percentage points of the observed difference. Twenty-five of the 26 users preferred application A and rated themselves as being more productive with it.

Our study confirms that a KLM analysis of a user interface predicts the actual time of experienced users to within a manageable margin-of-error. We believe that we can now apply KLM analysis to new products to see if they are likely to enable users to be more productive than with a previous product. We can build these productivity estimates well before any code has been generated, which allows us to test and retest designs in moving towards the most productive interface.

For more information on Keystroke Level Modeling see the references and detailed examples located in Wikipedia.

Design Matters - Seven Design Principles, Part II

Fri, 16 May 2008 13:34:25 -0800

Author: Douglas K. van Duyne, Principal, Naviscent LLC

(Editor's note: Douglas van Duyne is a principal at Naviscent LLC, which recently partnered with Oracle in the design of future Applications user interfaces, and is the lead author of The Design of Sites (2003). I invited Doug to contribute a multipart blog describing the process he uses to design the user experience. This is the second of three blogs which will appear monthly in this space.)

Our seven principles of Web design are intended to guide you to the destination you want to reach when you are finished building a Web site. We continue with design principles to make Web sites easier to use. Our first principle was to make Web sites consistent, in terms of architecture, interaction, appearance, and terminology. Our second, third, and fourth principles are:

2. Offer Informative Feedback

Create indicators on your Web pages that make the status of the Web site visible and that keep your customers informed about what is currently happening. For example, when customers are performing an e-commerce transaction, use a pattern that includes a progress bar to indicate the current state of the process. This type of element provides assurance to the customer that the Web site is functioning properly. The following figure provides an example:

Using a progress bar conveys process status to a user

Another important form of feedback is to let customers know when they are entering a secure area. You can do this by providing an action button that makes it clear that the Web site is using a secure connection, as in the following figure. This type of feedback lets your customers know that the information they are sending over the Internet is safe and secure.

Promoting secure transactions builds credibility with customers

3. Rely on Recognition over Recall

The key limitation in human cognition is short-term memory. Visual aids, such as the buttons and icons on a Web site, help to reduce the load on short-term memory by making it easier for customers to understand what they need to know to use the site. This explains why computers did not become the ubiquitous tools they are today until graphical user interfaces appeared on the scene. It is much more difficult for people to remember command line syntax for a character-based interface (such as DOS) than it is to recognize buttons or icons and associate them with their functions.

For example, there are currently two types of action buttons on the Web: graphical and HTML. The way in which you design the buttons for a site will affect the customer's ability to recognize their functions.

· Graphical action buttons are made from images that you modify to look like three-dimensional buttons that the customer can press. You can make these buttons look three-dimensional by adding shadows or slight lighting touches around the border of the image, as in the example below. This technique gives the impression that the image is raised, which provides a visual clue to the customer that the button is clickable. Web users do not perceive a flat image as a clickable button, and might ignore it. You should provide textual labels with the graphical action button images to explain their purpose. In addition, don't make the buttons too small. At Naviscent, we recommend a minimum size of 20 x 20 pixels.

· HTML action buttons are commonly rendered by browsers as rectangular gray buttons and are encoded directly in HTML. Because of their nature, you have less control over the layout and appearance of these buttons. HTML buttons that contain a large amount of text are visually unattractive due to their width. The best practice for HTML action buttons is to keep the text short, so that the button will be small enough for you to place it where you want it.

Examples of graphical and HTML action buttons

When you provide visual aids like these in your site, you reduce the memory load and the frustration level that might otherwise cause your customers to leave tasks incomplete.

4. Help Customers Avoid and Recover from Errors

When customers experience errors while working with a Web site, due to their own fault or that of the site designers, the result is frustration, lack of trust in the Web site, and poor performance. Engineer your site to minimize the number of errors that can occur, and try to anticipate potential errors, so that you can provide meaningful help when errors do occur.

For example, errors commonly occur when customers fill out online forms for an e-commerce transaction, such as shipping and delivery forms. When input fields require a specific type of data structure (such as telephone number fields that require the area code to be in parentheses, followed by groups of three and four digits, separated by a hyphen), be sure to clarify the required format by demonstrating the data structure in some way. You can do this by adding a note next to the field, as in the first example below, or you can provide separate fields for the area code, exchange, and number, as in the second example.

Formatting techniques to assist users and avoid frustration

No matter how error-proof you believe your Web site to be, customer input will cause errors occasionally. By anticipating user errors, you can provide help by presenting meaningful error messages that instruct the customer how to recover from the error. An incorrectly formatted phone number, for example, should generate an error message that specifically identifies the phone number field as the cause of the problem and reiterates the correct format. It would be better yet if you can design the site so that it automatically recovers from the error by reformatting the phone number, or offers to carry out the steps to help the customer recover from the error.

Reference: Van Duyne, , D.K, Landay, J.A, and Hong, J.I. (2003) The Design of Sites. Boston: Addison-Wesley.

The next blog entry will continue our discussion with the remaining principles.

Oracle End Users: The real stars of the COLLABORATE08 conference

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:32:02 -0800

Author: Velynda Prakhantree, Principal Usability Engineer - Oracle Applications User Experience

It's Tuesday April 15th, 2008, 12:08 p.m. You're in Denver, Colorado, finishing a tasty panini at a packed upscale deli on the 16th Street mall. With a couple of colleagues, you're remarking how the morning COLLABORATE08 conference sessions were more informative and promising than you'd predicted. You're optimistic and thirsty for more details on Oracle's next generation of products.

You'll have to fill me in on the next session later, you request as you stand, brushing a few sandwich crumbs from your business clothes. I've got a special appointment with the Oracle User Experience team.

After glancing at your email confirmation, you head across the street to a private conference room in a neighboring hotel. You approach the red-and-black, cloth-draped reception table where two friendly-looking Oracle staff await your arrival.

Gozel Aamoth and Teena Singh of the Oracle Applications User Experience Team coordinated the customer experience at COLLABORATE08.

Hello! a user experience team member greets you, shakes your hand, and spies your conference name badge. So glad you could come today. I'm Teena.

Nice to meet you, you warmly reply, intrigued by the partially obscured entrance. Teena leads you inside, and as you walk through the sizeable room, you observe nine different stations, divided by tall, heavy curtain panels. At each station, two or three people are deeply engaged in conversation around a computer screen.

Here we are, says Teena, as she stops at station #7 and introduces you to Sean, an Oracle usability engineer. Sean invites you to sit with him and a note-taker, Chris.

Principal Usability Engineer Sean Rice interviews a customer using Oracle prototype software at COLLABORATE08.

Today, Sean begins, we're going to look at a brand new prototype of a Human Resources application designed to support HR Managers in their daily tasks. Instead of just showing you a demo, we'd like you to actually test drive the prototype using some realistic tasks we've created. As you use the prototype, we want your honest feedback on what you like, don't like, what's intuitive or not, and how this would work for you in your real job. It's very important to us to know what end users like you have to say, because you are the people who will ultimately use this product. Based on your feedback, we're going to make design recommendations to the product team, so they can make changes before it is coded.

And so the customer feedback session begins...

You see, you are an end user of Oracle Applications, and today you're the star of the show.

Throughout the feedback session, Oracle usability engineers are recording your every reaction to the new prototype as you navigate through new functions, screens, and information. They observe where you hesitate or show confusion, ask you what you're thinking, and probe to understand what could be improved to make your job easier.

And for you, it's exciting to glimpse the next generation of applications your company may soon be using. That's a treat previously enjoyed by the decision makers in your company. It's also very satisfying to have a voice, to have your feedback heard. As a bonus, you were able to conveniently participate during your conference stay.

An hour flies by, and you can't believe how the session went so quickly. You're impressed with the level of detail structured into every task you performed and every question you were asked. You get the impression that Oracle puts a lot of effort into understanding what real end users want, need, and prefer.

And you're right.

Hundreds of end users participate in usability testing and research at Oracle every year. We do a lot of work in our in-house laboratory facilities, but we don't miss other opportunities to interact with and collect feedback from our customers. And where do large groups of Oracle customers gather? Conferences! Particularly, user group conferences like COLLABORATE08.

Conducting onsite usability testing at conferences is something Oracle is doing now, and aims to do even more. It can be a challenge getting the right people to participate in the session. What do I mean by "right"? Selecting end users fitting the profile of people who either directly use (or would use), an application. What sets usability testing apart from many other customer-facing activities is that nearly all of our work requires direct input from the end users of an application.

Department managers, IT Directors, and other decision makers are often consulted by other Oracle groups, such as Product Management, Strategy, or Development, to determine general functional, technical, and business requirements. They provide vital information, of course, but what they can't tell us are all those details about what it really takes for end users to get their jobs done. Only the end users can tell us that.

When it comes time to design, you can't create a great user experience without involving the users.

So for conferences, we need to partner with the organizers to contact attendees and make advance appointments with the right kinds of users. Participants need to answer some screening questions to make sure that the job they do matches the role used in the prototype. For example, if we are testing a prototype for creating sales forecasts, we need to make sure participants actually create forecasts in their real jobs.

Thanks to months of preparation, cooperation with organizers, and partnerships with many customers through Oracle's Global Design Partners program, nearly 75 participants gave us essential feedback on one of the seven different Fusion prototypes at COLLABORATE08.

Will all that effort make a difference in our products? You bet. Consulting the end users makes all the difference. You really are the stars and we design the whole experience just for you.

If you'd like more information about usability at Oracle, or want to get involved through our Global Design Partners program, feel to contact me, velynda.prakhantree@oracle.com, or teena.singh@oracle.com.

Remote Usability Testing

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 14:06:31 -0800

Author: Erika Webb, Manager UX - Oracle Applications User Experience

When I was first working in the usability field, the only way I could consider conducting a usability study was to bring a potential user to a lab environment where I could show them whatever I was interested in learning more about and ask them questions. While I hate to reveal just how long I have been working in this field, let's just say that pads of paper and a stopwatch were key tools for any test I conducted. Over the years, I have worked in simple labs with basic video taping equipment and not much else, and I have worked in corporate environments with sophisticated usability labs and state-of-the-art equipment.

Years ago, we conducted all usability studies at the location of the user. If we wanted to see if there were any differences between users in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, we went to those places to run the test. A lab environment is very useful for many test situations. However, there has always been a debate in the usability field about whether bringing someone into a lab environment, however friendly we make it, somehow intrinsically changes the behavior of the user as compared to having them work in their own environment, at their own desk, and on their own computer. We developed systems to create a portable usability lab, so that we could go to the users that we needed to test.

Do lab environments change user behavior patterns?

Then 9/11 hit. You may not remember, but no planes flew for weeks afterwards. Companies all over the world couldn't fly-in employees for meetings. Suddenly, traveling to the location of the users had an additional difficulty. The company I was working for at the time had usability specialists stuck in New York for days before they could finally rent a car and drive home to Colorado.

This changed the world pretty suddenly, and technology jumped on the change. Companies offering Internet meeting tools were strugglinguntil no one could travel. The Internet boomed with collaboration tools that enabled people to work together wherever they happened to be.

This change in technology has made a huge difference in my world. We use collaborative tools to bring our product concepts and ideas to the user across the Internet. As a global company, we benefit from having users from all over the world inform our designs. We now run usability studies with users all over the world in a single day, a feat we couldn't have accomplished 10 years ago by plane! Other technology companies have started to do more of this type of usability testing, since the tools have improved so dramatically. Plus, in our busy world, it's not always easy to find users who can take the time away from their jobs to come to our labs. reaching users where it is convenient for them greatly improves the odds that people do participate.

I manage a team of usability specialists who live in India and California, whlie I live in Colorado. We have wonderful labs that we bring users into to show them our products. But very often, we run our studies remotely. We used to take the lab to the users now we use the labs, but we let the users stay where they are. We gain users who might not have been able to leave work to come to our labs, and they get to use the system they are familiar with. And we gain users nearly anywhere that we can set up an Internet connection, as long as the users have a phone, a broadband connection, and a compatible Web browser (with no pop-up blockers).

After we recruit participants in a traditional manner, we send them an invitation to participate through the use of a telephone conference call and Web conferencing tool. At Oracle, we use Oracle Web Conference part of Oracle Collaboration Suite, which enables us to give the user control of the mouse, while we present a prototype or wireframe pictures. We can record the sessions over the Web and phone conference. We send the users instructions, plus tips to ensure that we won't have problems sharing screens. In some cases, when time is tight, we even run a five-minute "test session" with users a day in advance to be sure that we can connect.

Prior to the test, we send users a participant script that contains information about the study, including any questionnaires. This is exactly the same script we give to participants who come to the labs. We ask users to print this before the beginning of the session. We generally run these studies by having a usability engineer in our usability labs, so that we can record the session as though the user were in the lab with us.

Roughly 80% of our application software usability testing at Oracle is performed using remote methods. The probability of getting a remote test participant decreases the higher up the person is in the target organization. We have a methodology checklist available to help our usability engineers work through the remote processes.

Design Matters - Seven Design Principles, Part I

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:26:09 -0800

Author: Douglas K. van Duyne, Principal, Navicent LLC

Editor's note: Douglas van Duyne is a principal at Naviscent LLC, which recently partnered with Oracle in the design of future Applications user interfaces, and is the lead author of The Design of Sites (2003). I invited Doug to contribute a multipart blog describing the process he uses to design the user experience. This is the first of three blogs which will appear monthly in this space.

Our seven principles of Web design are intended to guide you to the destination you want to reach when you are finished building a Web site.

The seven design principles are as follows:

1. Be consistent throughout.

2. Offer informative feedback.

3. Rely on recognition over recall.

4. Help customers avoid and recover from errors.

5. Support customer control and freedom.

6. Help frequent customers use accelerators.

7. Strive for aesthetic and minimalist design.

1. Be Consistent Throughout

Consistency applies throughout the entire Web site, which encompasses several dimensions. Similar tasks should use a consistent sequence of actions throughout the entire site.

For example, you should place the navigation bar in the same place on each page. This helps the customers reach important parts of the Web site in a structured, organized, and understandable manner. There are three common types of navigation bars, as follows:

· Top-running navigation bar A top-running navigation bar stretches across the top of a Web page, as shown in the figure below. This type of navigation bar often functions as the top-level navigation, linking directly to different subsites or categories.

· Side-running navigation bar The common practice is to place a side-running navigation bar down the left side of a Web page, even on sites that you design for languages that read from right to left. These navigation bars provide more room for labels than top-running navigation bars. Their purpose is often to present second-level navigation, providing links within a subsite.

· Top-and-left navigation bar This navigation bar is sometimes referred to as an inverted L, because it resembles an upside-down letter L. The bar runs across the top and down the left side of a Web page. The top-running portion provides navigation across departments or subsites, and the side-running portion provides deep navigation within the current subsite.

Navigation bar consistency.

Mixing these navigation bars within a single site leads to confusion for users, as they grope their way around the site, looking for the link that they need. By keeping the location of the bar consistent, it becomes second nature for users to look in a specific place for navigation links.

The need for consistency also applies to the use of colors, fonts, and layouts throughout the pages of a site. A unified appearance reinforces the user's comfort at remaining in the same place. Pages with wildly divergent appearances might make users think that they've wandered into another site. You can implement the site's appearance manually or through the use of style sheets. Creating style sheets makes it easier to generate changes to the Web site later. The best practice is to separate the content and navigation code from that which provides the design and the layout, as shown in the figure below.

Separating content and navigation code (missing connector to Screen Reader)

This technique enables you to easily reuse the content and navigation code to build different designs as needed. For example, if you need a separate version of a site for mobile devices, you can use the same content and navigation code, and create a mobile style sheet to apply to it. If you have to create site pages that are most likely to be printed, you can create a print style sheet. Building Web sites in this manner, with customer's needs in mind, makes the sites more usable for everyone.

Make sure that task-critical action buttons are distinct and located in the same general position across different parts of the site, so that customers can find them with ease. When working on a task, customers looking at a Web site can become frustrated if they can't figure out the next step. Because Web pages "fold" in different places (due to a browser's window size), the best practice is to place critical action buttons as close to the top of a page as possible, without being at the absolute top, as shown in the following figure.

Placement of task-critical action buttons - Current page to the next page.

Use identical terms throughout the Web site. Follow real-world conventions and use familiar terminology, rather than technical jargon. Stick to terms that your customers will understand. Interview and observe test customers to make sure that they understand the Web site. Use the information that you gather from this test group to create content and links that are understandable and predictable to your customers.

Applying customer terminology.

The next blog entry will continue our discussion with the remaining principles

Getting Internet Usability to the Next Level: Oracle Usability Advisory Board

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 11:20:16 -0800

Author: Anna M. Wichansky Ph.D CPE, usableapps.oracle.com blog editor

In every endeavor, there are issues that persist regardless of our best singular efforts to resolve them. So it goes with usability. In my 13 years as Usability Manager and Senior Director of Advanced User Interfaces at Oracle, I have tackled and conquered many a usability problem. These ranged from designing icons for abstract database concepts that would appeal to an international audience, to inventing entirely new user models for previously non-existent products, such as web servers and network computers. But there are always those nagging issues that won't go away. In fact, they seem to become more important as features and functions are added to products in the relentless march of time and technology. Those have always been the problems that interested me the most.

Currently my target sites are set on Web 2.0. As the Web becomes organic, users will be interacting with it in new ways. We will be contributing our own thoughts and ideas more easily and freely to existing websites. We will be tagging our own content to make it easier for others to find. We will be spending time online as members of social networks for business and pleasure. We will be using websites we encountered on desktops and laptops in a variety of new ways on mobile devices.

Will Web 2.0 move usability of the Internet to the next level? That all depends. Often new technologies are introduced that are extremely functional, with remarkable features designed to solve problems users didn't even know they had. Sometimes those technologies stumble, due to behavioral problems in learning, usage, and acceptance.

It's one thing to play with Web 2.0 for fun. But how will users absorb all of this in the context of performing their jobs? Their productivity will likely be impacted as they climb the learning curve, positively or negatively.

Some of these features are obviously transformational in terms of how we do our work. The ability of a researcher, for instance, to have open access to others content and search on relevant tags can save a lot of time. Meeting a much-needed contact through a social network referral can save a hiring manager weeks or months of non-productive screening and interviewing.

We can also anticipate negative effects on productivity. They may include: increases in distraction from work due to social networking on the job data privacy and security issues as we share information more freely and more time spent installing, upgrading, maintaining, and monitoring multiple devices than anyone ever hoped for.

Because we thought these issues would be of great interest to our customers, we are starting a group for dialog and discussion. Oracle has invited customers who have been active in our Global Design Partners program to participate in the Oracle Usability Advisory Board. I am chairing the board, with Alisa Hamai in the Applications UX department serving as co-chair. The board currently consists of 18 companies, government organizations, and universities using Oracle Applications, plus independent usability experts who will consult on pertinent topics. They will be actively sharing their experiences and opinions on enterprise software usability through face-to-face meetings and on-line Web conferences.

To date, leaders in 15 organizations have confirmed attendance at our first meeting on March 28, 2008 at Oracles Headquarters Conference Center in Redwood Shores, California. The theme of this meeting will be user productivity with enterprise software, focusing on Web 2.0 features. We expect to have at least 3 face-to-face meetings in 2008 at various geographic locations, as well as regular online meetings and conference calls to continue progress toward our goals. More details will be forthcoming in future blogs.

Solutions will likely be proposed that go beyond what we can do at Oracle or any one organization. Oracle will lead the effort to mobilize improvement strategies in these areas. Expected outcomes may be standards, guidelines, best practices, and technology requirements for future systems. It will also give board members an important networking opportunity, to learn from one another's experiences in implementing and using products with these types of features.

When customers and vendors work together, and reach out to sources beyond themselves for solutions, it is often possible to move the usability of technology to the next level. Speaking as an Oracle manager, that is our goal for the Oracle Applications User Experience. Speaking as a usability professional, that is our goal for Web 2.0.

For more information on the Oracle Usability Advisory Board, contact
anna.wichansky@oracle.com,

User Experience growing by leaps and bounds in China

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 09:27:46 -0800

Author: Amit Pande, Senior Manager - Oracle Applications User Experience

Editor's note: Amit Pande and Jeremy Ashley Of Oracle Applications UX group recently made presentations at the 2007 Usability Professionals Association UX Annual Conference in Beijing, China.

Amit on the Great Wall of China

If you follow the news you probably know that China has the fastest growing economy in the world (10% per year). It has more mobile phone users than twice the size of the US population (540 million) and more Internet users than America in 2008. China has slowly become the world's factory and a voracious consumer of steel and cars and oil and technology. However, I believe a design and innovation revolution is simultaneously taking shape as well. Has the design community in China finally arrived? What does it mean for Fortune 500 technology companies like Oracle?

In November 2007, I found myself in a position to look at these questions directly. My VP Jeremy Ashley and I were invited by UPA China for the User Friendly 2007 conference in Beijing.

The conference started at 9 am sharp on Nov 23 with over 500 attendees and a visit to the Great Wall for the speakers and workshop presenters! We even got ourselves photographed in General Mao gear!

On Nov 24 the paper sessions started after overviews by (now former) UPA Global President Thyra Rauch and Jason Huang (UPA China) and Doreen Lorenzo from Frog Design. Jeremy's keynote address on the Business of User Experience was very well-received. He described the executive level perspective on how User Experience generates business value both within a company (with technology and marketing teams) and with customers and end users. In his workshop, Jeremy provided hands on tips and guidance on a very contemporary topic for China based technology companies and consultancies, how design managers can align User Experience goals with Business goals. My workshop presentation focused on how companies can leverage global, distributed, virtual design teams to drive design collaboration and innovation.

Speaker of the day, User Friendly 2007 in Beijing, China

Overall, the range of presentation topics was as vast as last year, they included the Future Web (Jeff Veen, Google), Wayfinding (Lance Wyman), Design education in China (Prof Patrick Yau), Web 2.0 in China (Bo Yang) and Self Service Usability (Sam Ng) - enough to satisfy a broad range of design practitioners. However, this year there was more of a "buzz" around Web 2.0 and Innovation. The "tracks" at the conference indicated how important these themes and industries are for the Chinese UX community: Telecom, Internet and Software, Industrial products, Design Education, the Business of UX, and Public Services. Overall I observed many more companies this time (including startups), more talk about new usability labs by Fortune 500 companies and an increasing presence of local Chinese technology and consultancy companies. UPA China has done a fantastic job both years in attracting universities with design programs in China, South Korea, and Japan. I met some very interesting faculty and students from Tsinghua University and other local schools.

In the conference networking events I tried to put this all together and see if I could get the "big picture" of China's design ecosystem - How is Chinese design advancing? What can be expected by 2010? I posed this question to industry colleagues like Daniel Szuc (UPA Board member), Guo Yu (UX, Baidu.cn which leads China's search market), Rex Wong (Yahoo, Hong Kong) and Liya Zheng (Liquidnet, New York). Some felt that Chinese design was ready to challenge global design and it was a matter of "when", not "if". Others pointed to the rapid growth of Web 2.0 sites in China like www.douban.cn and www.alibaba.com as a sign of design innovation. Some pointed to the R&D presence of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, HP and others as a sign of a maturing design ecosystem. Many suggested that it might take another generation of free thinking for more design innovation to come from China. I particularly liked Liya's note on the realities of Design in China.

I also carried some of these conversations along to Oracles China development center at the Zhongguancun Software Park in Beijing. One key difference from my last visit in 2006 was the interest in product innovation, Web 2.0, desktop gadgets and mobile technology. Colleagues in China were excited that Oracle may be looking to expand its UX presence in the region in the future. While the plans for Oracle's usability labs in China are still being finalized, it might not be long before the first batch of Apps UX designers and usability professionals finally arrive in Oracle's Zhongguancun facility. We will then have to figure out the best times for meetings between California and China.

Usability Innovations for Scrum

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:24:03 -0800

Author: Dilip Chetan, Senior Usability Engineer - Oracle Applications User Experience

Scrum is an agile software development method characterized by iterative incremental development of product components. The product to be built is broken up into modules. Each module is developed in a short cycle, at the end of which the module is ready to be shipped. This approach can result in major challenges for usability engineers, who are used to having a whole product to test, or at least sufficient pieces to allow a user to simulate an important task.

The concept of Scrum did not originate in the software industry. The term was actually first used to describe an iterative development process used in the manufacturing industry by Takeuchi and Nonaka in a Harvard Business Review article (1986). The word "Scrum" was borrowed from rugby to describe the interplay and the constant interaction (a sort of "huddling together") of hand-picked interdisciplinary team members who work together from start to finish. Takeuchi and Nonaka documented different variations of this process in large companies like Honda, Canon, HP, and Epson.

It wasn't long before Scrum found its way into software development. Ken Schwaber used it in the early 1990's at his company, Advanced Development Methods. Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales, and Jeff McKenna used it at Easel Corporation. Ken presented Scrum as a formal process in 1995 (Schwaber). Jeff was one of the organizers of the conference. Today, almost all the major software development companies have multiple teams applying Scrum.

As with any development methodology, Scrum brings with it a set of challenges. There are the usual questions of compatibility with company size. Scrum traditionally works best with small teams in a start-up kind of environment. How will large companies make it work? (Many online articles and blogs, such as the one here equate the combination of Scrum and big companies with oil and water). There are also issues of corporate culture. Developers who are used to the waterfall method will certainly balk at the thought of building a product in weeks instead of months or even years (as it is sometimes the case).

Scrum also presents challenges that are specific to the User Experience community. Scrum has all along been a development process and does not include any room for design cycles or usability testing iterations. The big question confronting User Experience teams is, how does User Centered Design fit into all this?

Smart organizations not only found a way to alleviate some of these concerns, they actually discovered how to make Scrum thrive. For instance, with regard to organizational size, Scrum was actually born in large companies with complex cultures. These organizations found ways to make Scrum work in spite of various obstacles. And that is what Scrum does among other things. It fosters innovation. In fact, any team that wants to make Scrum work has to take a leap of faith and rely heavily on the team's problem solving and innovative abilities.

At Oracle, Scrum has encouraged User Experience (UX) professionals to come up with radical and novel solutions to the challenge of integrating User Centered Design with the Scrum methodology. For instance, our design teams have come up with methods to proactively engage with Strategy and Product teams to prioritize our deliverables. We run our own cycles in parallel with the development sprints. We have also broadened our influence in beyond UX activities. User experience is not just involved in the design stage we also participate in setting functional specifications and high level architecture creation. We are planners as much as executors.

We have found ways to integrate cultures (those barbeques and volleyball games certainly helped!). We have borrowed some best practices from the Waterfall model of Software development and incorporated them into our sprints. As for usability testing, Scrum is compatible with the use of discount usability testing. The usability engineer (UE) needs to be focused on identifying as many issues as possible in a short time and provide quick recommendations. In this context, we have even come up with a new usability testing method (called Spatial Story Modeling) that is tailored specifically to work with Scrum stories.

The innovations made for Scrum can also be ported to other development methodologies. That is probably the biggest benefit in working with Scrum. The new methods of design and usability testing that we came up with can be adapted to any kind of software development process. The spirit of innovation fostered by Scrum is contagious. Who knows, it will not be long before every team (regardless of what development methodology it is following) is involving UX in setting functional specs. Isn't that every User Experience professional's dream?

References:

Schwaber, Ken (1995). Scrum Development Process. Proceedings from the Tenth Annual Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, 15-19 October 1995, Austin, Texas, USA, http://jeffsutherland.com/oopsla/schwaber.html.

Takeuchi, Hirotaka, and Nonaka, Ikujiro. (1986). The New New Product Development Game, Harvard Business Review, January - February, pp137-146.

A Developer's Confessions About User Experience

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 13:23:07 -0800

Author: Peter Heller, Senior Director - Oracle Applications Marketing

We're All Designers

Don't you think computers are fun? Don't they make life better?

I was a developer once. Although back then, I was called a programmer. I took great pride in that phase of my career. I could write systems in my sleep. In fact, I often did. And do you know what gave me the most pleasure? Designing the user interactivity "that was what made computers really fun and cool" we were going to change the world! Only now am I able to put my passion into words, and it even has a name: user experience.

Was I doing anything special or unique? I don't think so. I did what all programmers did. First, I had to convince the users that automation was possible and that change wasn't a bad thing. After I cleared that hurdle, I was usually home free. The creative and satisfying part was inventing new, more efficient ways to help people get their jobs done.

I designed the screens, provided lots of conveniences, decided on the usage for the 12 function keys, outlined the program logic, organized the subroutines, and made the program work. Of course, in the days of IBM CCP and 5250 block mode, there were not a lot of interactivity opportunities, but I always tried to find new ways to make the application more interactive and aesthetically pleasing. I'd always make that extra effort to contextually present the right information and functions at the right time. I'd eliminate visual distractions by hiding fields, add new screens or pop-ups to show more detail, and streamline task completion by extensively using keyboard function keys. I applied my own design principles, such as never place the Accept and Cancel function keys adjacent to each other, something that really bugged me. I'd also make information more understandable by interpreting data, for example, rather than simply displaying a date, I displayed 22 days until end of quarter, or 10 days until due. When color devices were introduced, I attended a class to learn how to properly use color. Unfortunately, none of our customers ever bought a color monitor, as they cost $22,000 at that time. In the end, I felt that my work made life better for the users, and I had fun changing the world!

What? There's a Design Process?

I stopped being a developer and did other things for a long time. And then one day, I met a clan of people who earned academic degrees in human-computer interaction. Amazing! They were also artists, industrial designers, psychologists, and sociologists. Their experiences and interests were fascinating and diverse. They designed furniture, fighter jet cockpits, and coffee pots. Although these people were not developers like me, we shared a "design passion", but I was out-of-date. They had something that I didn't know anything about: they had a design process. I was welcomed into the clan (after passing several rituals) and they taught me about their processes, frameworks, tenets, and principles. Now I know that most of you probably understand the science of usability, but to a neophyte like me, it was an eye-opening experience.

For the uninitiated, usability is one of those things that is first understood in the negative. By that I mean, it is often easier to know when something isn't usable than when it is. Usability is also implicitly personal, influenced by experience, expertise, and expectation. On my path to appreciating usability, I have encountered three types of individuals that span many roles.

The Cynic. Cynics equate usability with perfection and are never happy, because as the imperfect among us know, perfection is not achievable. Cynics who care about design are also never happy, since perfect design is equally unachievable (so I'm told).

The Apathetic. The indifferent are "above it all" and don't even want to get it. These are people who don't think computers are fun and who belabor the burden of Blackberriesä. They have missed the poetry in life, can't sing a tune, and have no soul. Ooops. Maybe I went a little far there.

The Fan. Fans find themselves saying things like "wow,cool, ooo, aah", and "OK then". Fans recognize and appreciate usability. But, being a fan does not necessarily equate to being an enthusiast. Fans may not be able to find the right words and say, that's really well designed. Instead, they may just smile and feel the utility of it all and say, OK then and onto the next thing they go. Regardless, great user experiences touch fans profoundly.

Lessons Learned

I am no longer a developer, but I still have the spirit of a designer. Today, I have a renewed appreciation for usability. I now see usability in everything. I still love systems design, even if I am relegated to using Excel and PowerPoint. In fact, I am pretty jealous today's developers have the tools to amaze us with breakthrough user experiences. But are they? Have they proven an optimized design by verifying it with a user-centered methodology?

I have watched customers participate in usability tests and experience the extremes of confusion and enthusiasm. The uninitiated product manager and developer are often dumbfounded, embarrassed, apologetic, and entirely confused when their designs turn out to be shortsighted. But, the real shortcoming is their inability to explain their results in either case. Should someone be blamed for these failures? Sometimes, product managers fall into the trap of valuing and designing specific features and functions independently from a user-centered design (UCD) methodology that provides a more complete context. And sometimes users surprise us, because people's expectations and experiences rapidly evolve.

The lesson learned is that a user-centered design methodology provides a safety net. Regardless of the outcome, refinement and iteration are part of the UCD process and any shortcoming can be corrected. Without the process, you would never know if you succeeded or not.

If It Smells Good, Take a Bite

What have I learned? The process of design is just as important as the design itself. Outstanding results are not an accident. While creativity and inspiration have a place in the process, they are not the process. The right results are a by-product of listening, observing, and having a product vision. A methodology-based result rings true every time. To design well, you need disciplined professionals to guide you, and this may be a luxury for some. All I can say is to join a user experience (UX) clan. Surround yourself in design methodology, read the books, hire the people, take time to test, be an artist, and lose your ego. When you can't understand why people don't like something that you poured your heart into, wake up and smell the coffee. See past your nose. And, as Auntie Gertie says, "if it smells good, take a bite!"

Oracle WebCenter

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:15:52 -0800

Author: John Cartan, Design Architect - Oracle Applications User Experience

Editor's note: The author attended Oracle OpenWorld at San Franciscos Moscone Center the week of November 11, 2007. This is the fourth in a series of four reports from the show floor.

When I first heard about Oracle WebCenter, I thought it was an application and wanted to see a screenshot. I discovered that WebCenter is better understood as a set of tools and a philosophy, so asking for a screenshot is like asking for a screenshot of the Web itself.

WebCenter embodies the philosophy that I wrote about in my previous posting: Enterprise 2.0. The goal of WebCenter is to provide a new platform for user interaction that is multi-channel, that is integrated, and that unifies access. In other words, WebCenter is a platform that enables you to make your own mashups and build personal and community "spaces", in which the end user can personalize or customize almost everything.

The key to making this work is an underlying framework that is based on a service-oriented architecture built using open standards. This approach is a core concept for Oracle Fusion and is also being woven into the Oracle Applications Unlimited ecosystem. Using open standards is crucial, because the real power of mashups is in the ability to draw from the ever-changing ocean of new services out on the Web.

One demo of the WebCenter Composer tool illustrated this power by showing how an end user could quickly assemble her own task-oriented start page. To assemble a list of contacts for an ongoing project, she clicked on names from her personal LinkedIn network. WebCenter scraped this information and produced a contact table which automatically incorporated chat services, through which you could immediately see who was online and simply click a contact name to start chatting. Notice the assumption behind this use case: Enterprise 2.0 projects increasingly draw talent not only from fellow employees, but also from partner and customer contacts as well.

Another demo illuminated the dissolving barrier between corporate Web applications and the user's everyday desktop applications. A user starts a project in a WebCenter group space. He exports an initial list of group issues to Excel and finishes it offline. When he returns to the group space, his new issues are seamlessly integrated into the existing table. A set of newly assigned activities on that same page are broadcast through RSS and show up in another member' s Google desktop gadget. Upon logging into Outlook, the items automatically appear in the user's task list.

WebCenter's commitment to the power of open source social networking was echoed in other OpenWorld presentations. In his Applications Unlimited strategy overview, Jesper Andersen announced that Oracle was working on an open source reports repository, sort of a Flickr for report templates of any kind. He also announced Oracle Mix, an open site for Oracle users to network and share ideas. This site grew out of Oracle AppsLab, an internal think tank developed to explore Web 2.0 concepts.

To those of us in User Experience, WebCenter and sites like Oracle Mix signal the end of laying out controls on fixed screens or pages. Our challenge now is to develop easy-to-use modules, widgets, portlets, and services that fit together in ways that adapt to the individual needs of each user and each task.

Innovating Globally: Design Innovation Across Borders

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 10:34:47 -0800

Author: Sameer Bhiwani, Principal Interaction Designer - Oracle Applications User Experience

If you have ever worked with a team whose members are spread across at least three different time-zones around the globe, you are likely to have encountered some of the following situations:

You give a presentation over a Web conference to five people that you have never met, and there is absolute silence when you are finished talking.

·
You are responding to an e-mail chain among three stakeholders about a single small functionality, and each one responds to your initial bullet points "inline" in a different color. You have been at it for four days and you are running out of colors.

· You receive a voice mail at 2:45 a.m. for an urgent project meeting about to start in two hours. You listen to the voice mail for the first time at 9 a.m. while reading the meeting minutes.

These are just a few of the challenges people face when working in a global environment. If you are a designer or simply a visually expressive person (you know, the type of person who can't explain anything without a whiteboard and at least three different colored markers), there are even more interesting examples of running around in circles trying to communicate your ideas to the rest of the team (despite the detailed user interface specifications document that you stayed up two nights to write and illustrate).

Welcome to Innovating Globally, I will cover a range of topics that relate to global design and innovation in the enterprise applications space. This is by no means a definitive guide it is rather a set of recommended practices, real project examples, and future predictions on the nature of global design and suggestions on making it successful. Feel free to comment, critique, share stories, and give suggestions based on your own experiences.

Before delving into how and where innovation happens, let me explain what I mean by global design work and provide some examples of global teams and how they work together. Global work is not a new concept. Current industry examples include:

Outsourcing - where work is given to another company. There are many scales at which outsourcing happens, from a specific project to an entire business process. For example: An IT service company takes over product development from a software product company. A product company outsources its customer support to a support services firm or call center. A large organization outsources its finance, human resources, and travel services to different companies.

Offshoring¹ - where work is given to another location within the same company. The standard model is called an "independent development center", which is located away from the company's headquarters and is responsible for a set of products or a particular market.

Global development - where the members of a team from groups like strategy, product management, design, development, testing/QA, and so on, are in different locations and time zones, but work together to execute a project.

An organization that chooses to adopt any of these models of work does so in order to optimize their costs, leverage process expertise, or provide services to multiple markets, among other reasons. In each of these models, people are usually required to work with others in different locations, time zones, and cultures. Workers on all sides of the global project face similar challenges.

While much has been written about how to become a "global" worker and overcome these challenges, we don't have much guidance on how to explore the possibilities of innovating that arise from this situation. This is what I hope to explore through this series of articles and your feedback on them.

For the past few years, I have been located in Oracle's Bangalore office and have worked on several projects that required me to work as part of a global team. Sometimes I was the only designer, and sometimes I was collaborating on the design.

Here's a recent example:

As part of a project designing a CRM application, we were required to assist the product team in creating the task flows, create a navigation model, design, test, and review the wireframes, and create prototypes. The team was located in multiple countries and across multiple time zones, as illustrated in this map.

Global CRM Application Team Locations

The project manager was located in California, and the designers were located in California, Colorado, and Bangalore. Other team members were located in Texas, Georgia, Hawaii and Germany. Other team pmembers represented a variety of different organizations within Oracle. Although team members in all locations did not have to work together on a daily basis, most project tasks involved members in at least three time-zones with meetings held two to three times a week.

¹The difference between outsourcing and offshoring is debatable. Outsourcing can and does take place in the same geographical location (in which case it is not "global work") but the term usually refers to the process of getting work done from another organization in another location (off-shore). In my mind, the difference is in ownership of resource outsourcing is to another company, while offshoring is to another location of the same company.

Enterprise 2.0

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 11:18:24 -0800

Author: John Cartan, Design Architect - Oracle Applications User Experience

Editor's note: The author attended Oracle OpenWorld at San Franciscos Moscone Center the week of November 11, 2007. This is the third in a series of four reports from the show floor.

One of the major themes emerging in OpenWorld this year was Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 for the enterprise. It was being presented as a core concept for both Fusion and Apps Unlimited, and it was all about user experience.

Many of the sessions I attended this year began by trying to define the murky term "Web 2.0". One take was that Web 1.0 was about connecting information (using HTML), Web 1.5 was about connecting applications (using XML), and Web 2.0 is about connecting users (using AJAX). Web 2.0 applications use a rich, desktop-like user experience to provide a framework for highly social (user-driven, collaborative) interactions. An acronym which sums up Oracle's approach to Web 2.0 is SLATES, which stands for Searching, Linking, Authorship, Tagging, Extensions, and Signaling.

It's not immediately clear to everyone that Web 2.0 makes sense for the enterprise. Another session I attended called "Bring Web 2.0 to the Enterprise" tackled this head-on. They identified, and attempted to dispel, three myths about Web 2.0.

Myth 1 is that Web 2.0 is just about Google and blogs. But it goes deeper than that. Web 2.0 is about users creating content Wikipedia, categorizing content (tags), combining content (mashups) and building communities Facebook, LinkedIn. Communities plus content equals "collective intelligence", surely something worthwhile for the enterprise.

Myth 2 is that it's just for teens. The speaker pointed to a survey of 2800 mostly IT executives which found that 75% already planned to invest in Web 2.0 and 67% regretted they hadn't started sooner. Executives spoke of the need to harness the collective knowledge of employees, partners, and customers. Myth 3 is that it's just for startups and bleeding edge companies. Another survey showed that 90% of major companies are ready to embrace Web 2.0, provided it is supplied from a trusted source with experience in handling scaling and security issues (like Oracle).

A filmed interview with Harvard Business School pprofessor Andrew McAfee got to the heart of the issue. He argued that Web 2.0 was a fundamental paradigm shift away from imposed structure and rules to organic, bottom-up platforms that naturally accumulate content and form effective networks. This is a scary concept for some, but it's an approach that the incoming workforce is already steeped in, and one that has already chalked up some impressive results (described in books like Wikinomics).

All of this seems to me like a natural evolution of user-centered design, the approach we in the user experience community have been pushing for decades. The basic tenets of that approach are that computers should be easy to use and that people should always feel in control.

Every speaker I heard emphasized that Web 2.0 applications have to be easy to use. No one has to take classes in order to use services like Flickr or Wikipedia. Software that requires extensive training is something we can no longer afford.

And all this talk about mashups, and users generating and sharing their own content, is really about giving users more control over the way they perform their tasks. Computers will not fully achieve their potential until we are fully in control of them. Enterprise 2.0 is the inevitable next step in that evolution.

Q. (Editor): John, it sounds like enterprises are preparing to utilize Web 2.0 in a big way. How will features such as social networking or tags affect worker productivity?

A. Every office I've ever seen has at least one power user, someone who has figured out all the work-arounds and knows where to find hidden information. This person will occasionally poke her head over the cubicle wall to help new co-workers, but most of her hard-won knowledge is effectively bottled up. Imagine the productivity gains if people like this can easily share their knowledge across not just the local office but the entire enterprise. The power of a technique like tagging is that it captures the insights of experienced workers and makes that knowledge available to others. And if that knowledge can be delivered in context, at the moment users are trying to perform a new task, it means fewer interrupted task flows and less time wasted reinventing wheels.

Q. Are Oracle databases prepared to handle the content that will be generated by all the "organic growth" of the Internet we can expect from Web 2.0?

A. Web 2.0 does not necessarily increase the amount of content stored in any one place but instead increases the access to content that is already distributed across many sources. Our challenge as user experience designers is ensuring that pages load quickly and that additional content like a portlet or an embedded analytic snaps into place at the moment it's needed. Our developers and performance experts do a remarkable job of coping with these demands we are doing things today that just weren't possible a few years ago. And with increased use of AJAX partial page refreshes and other Web 2.0 techniques I am confident that we'll continue to evolve an ever-richer user experience.