The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters… Learnability, Usability, Efficiency

December 15, 2008

A good call to action for rich internet application projects at the enterprise level, including Universal Mind and all that we’re moving forward with. UX in the RIA realm is a necessary push for us to communicate the value of UX as we advise our customers on how to take the work to the next level.

http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000362.php

Paul Sherman’s call to enterprise solution project owners:
Your technology selection processes are incomplete. You’re not assessing the usability of the technology you buy. You’re not only incurring huge hidden costs because of this failure to assess usability, you’re letting enterprise technology vendors get away with building products with poor usability.

The complexity of the systems is generally the challenge, borrowing MAYA Design’s trademarked phrase “Taming Complexity” – which is a beautiful phrase (but c’mon trademarking? Especially after presumably borrowing Raymond Loewy’s “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable – MAYA” for their name… but I digress.) Taming the complexity inherent in a solution, but also integrating that solution within the context of a workflow process, as well as with an array of technologies stitched together, is at the heart the multifaceted challenge of enterprise RIA design and development.

Two consequences of poor usability:

• Some businesses find that their employees’ productivity actually decreases, because common or critical processes take longer using the new application.
• Others fail to realize an application’s benefits, because users vote with their fingers and don’t adopt the new system.

This reminds me of Alan Cooper’s story in The Innmates are Running the Asylum describing the fact that veteran airline stewards choose not to fly typically desirable flights they had access to due to not wanting ot deal with the unusable, media technology installed on the bigger planes. Employee morale and satisfaction is a key factor for success and the technology was ultimately destroying it.

Airline Steward Satisfaction?

Application learnability, usability, and efficiency are key factors in the ultimate success and acceptance of an enterprise RIA. Sherman’s call to teams to effectively test a trial version of a solution before implementation with their internal users is key, as well as seeking these goals in the design and development of custom solutions.

Considering these three concepts: efficiency, usability, and learnability in a “reverse” order illustrates the need for a solution to ultimately BE EFFICIENT. Time is money, effective process of data and communications over the ever-growing internet cloud is key to serving customers and saving money for an organization. Efficiency drives it all and really is the goal of an enterprise solution. But all too often the user of the system is overlooked and in human-computer interaction it is not only the computer working efficiently, but of course the “human” as well.

An efficient solution needs to be continually used by a human user and the ease of that use is usability. A solution that is able to be consistently used well and effectively over time leads to achieving the goal of efficiency.

In order to get to that point of a usable solution over time, the system needs to be quickly learned, hence learnability. The value of this primer, the first interaction of a user with a new system is an exciting key interaction in building successful enterprise RIA’s. Rather than follow the mentioned “50 slide training presentation with a following 1.5 hour video training” to get users almost oriented to a solution, what if the solution was built to inherently facilitate learnability and was placed in front of them and the UX designer only gave them a few tasks to complete as training – actually using the solution – and only observed… To implement a system that had resources embedded in the system as intuitive uses and help prompts, new user scripts for initiation, which I refer to as a “graceful elevation of advanced uses” would be wonderful. (I hope to re-post about this concept of Graceful Elevation in a future post as it relates to the concept of “graceful degradation“.)

Sherman’s point and posts are timely and excellent calls to increasing the standards of our complex enterprise solutions to achieve simple, learnable, usable, and efficient methods.