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Usability is one of the most critical issues when introducing new technology. An application must be easy to use and offer a good user interface design that will enable users to be more productive and efficient. These are concepts that Oracle has taken to heart as it develops Oracle Fusion with an emphasis on user-centered design (UCD).
Oracle Vice President of Applications User Experience Jeremy Ashley reveals that Oracle has doubled its investment in resources dedicated to usability, including research, design, modification, testing, and redesign. UCD is a process that helps Oracle identify what's important to users and to put the right functions together into business flows that are particularly effective and easy. UCD enables Oracle to identify the optimum way to design a product based on users being able to quickly, accurately, and easily complete their tasks.
UCD also plays an important role in reducing the total cost of ownership because it requires developers to spend additional time on research, design and testing during development so that new products address user needs and benefit their businesses. Productivity depends on user experience, and that is directly linked to total cost of ownership.
Read how Oracle is using UCD to modernize Oracle Fusion's interface so that it can meet modern expectations and requirements, including crisper performance, improved visual effects, and better organization of screen information
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Oracle Fusion
Clear Skies Ahead
By David A. Kelly
Next-generation usability makes users happier and more productive.
Sue Shaw knows the importance of usability. As the enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications architect at Shell Canada, she's tasked with serving the IT demands of Shell Canada's 4,200 applications users. She knows that the success or failure of an IT project comes down to one thing—value to the employee. "It's really our employees who determine how effective a piece of software is," says Shaw. "For them, it's always about being able to get their jobs done quickly and accurately."
| Usability Defined
Usability is a measure of the ease with which people can employ software to achieve a particular goal. Usability encompasses information architecture, navigation, layout, and style elements that cater to user expectations and needs, improving productivity and reducing resistance to new deployments.
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Faced with rolling out new technology, it is Shaw's responsibility to ensure that new systems make life easier—rather than more complicated and difficult—for Shell's employees. While many issues factor into the adoption of a new system (change management, core functionality, and performance, among others), one stands out as the most obvious to end users: usability.
"When software is rushed to market despite poor usability, it costs more to sell and support, incurs more costs when it's deployed, and can reduce the customer's overall satisfaction," says Jeff Johnson, president of UI Wizards, a product usability consulting firm based in San Francisco. "Good usability and good UI design can help lower total cost of ownership and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of an application."
Next-Generation Applications, Next-Generation Usability
Building Oracle Fusion applications presents a significant usability challenge for developers of next-generation software: How do you roll together the best features of several software products—each with users who are accustomed to specific ways of using the software—and make the resulting software product appealing to the entire user base? The solution: Deliver undeniably
effective usability.
In the development of Oracle Fusion, Oracle has significantly increased resources dedicated to usability. "We've doubled our investment over the last year," says Jeremy Ashley, vice president of applications user experience at Oracle. "Creating and delivering products with great usability is something we take very seriously."
"With Fusion, one of our biggest challenges is quality and consistency across the products," Ashley continues. "We have a centralized user experience team providing guidance across all of our applications. We're very much aware of the challenge we face and that's part of the reason we've made such an important commitment to usability and developing leading-edge interfaces for Fusion and all Oracle products."
For Oracle Fusion, that means investing considerable time and money in a process known as user-centered design (UCD). "User-centered design helps us to prioritize and identify what's important for our users, as well as what's not important, and put the right functions together into business flows that are particularly effective and easy," says Ashley. "The UCD process allows us to identify the optimum way to design a product, based on the people being able to quickly, accurately, and easily complete their tasks."
| What Makes a
Good UI?
While there are many factors that go into determining whether a specific user interface design is good or bad, Oracle's Anna Wichansky has a few ideas on what makes a good UI:
Efficient. The most important consideration for a UI is that it be efficient. Users should feel like they're using Oracle products as a tool to accomplish their own work objectives, not that their job is using Oracle products.
Enabling. A UI should also support the user's tasks. (That's why Oracle researches what users want to do.)
Looks good. A UI should be pleasant to look at and use, because people are going to have to look at it all day long.
Supportive. A UI should be supportive when users make errors, so it doesn't blow up or lose their data. It should give reasonable help that's comprehensible and understandable.
Consistency. At a minimum, a UI has to be consistent.
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Oracle's focus on usability is attractive to Shell Canada's Shaw. "The process of usability studies and UCD is great and I'm impressed by Oracle's complete approach, because it's novel for such a large software vendor to actually get user input so early on in the design process," says Shaw. "Shell Canada sees the long-term value for itself of getting involved with companies like Oracle to help advise on usability issues and features."
The Customer Is at the Center
UCD ensures that an application meets the user's needs, supports critical functionality, does not interfere with the user's goals, is attractive, and is tailored to real-world tasks. It allows product managers to identify and prioritize what's important for the users and put those tasks together in flows that are logical and intuitive.
"User-centered design is very important," says Johnson. "If you're developing an application, you're working from a set of requirements. Those requirements have to come from your customers. I believe it's incumbent on the software designers to go and get those requirements and understand them well enough to address the business need."
In UCD, tasks are defined not at the user interface or software level, but at the business level. For example, the engineers designing a Web banking program need to first define the tasks that need to be completed, such as transferring money from one account to another or checking an account balance, rather than first defining what buttons users will click and how windows will be laid out.
"When your software becomes a true consumer product, or is universally used in offices as in the case of Oracle, the usability must be very good," says Johnson. "One thing that I've always been impressed by with Oracle is that they have a process that requires usability testing at various points along the way. You'd be surprised at how many companies out there ship products without first testing them on their customers."
UCD also plays a critical role in lowering the total cost of ownership of Oracle Fusion. Luke Kowalski, corporate UI architect for Oracle, says UCD requires developers to spend extra time on the research, design, testing, and validation stages of development to ensure new products address customer needs and benefit their businesses.
| A Vision of Oracle Fusion
With something as important and visible as the user interface, existing Oracle clients and prospective Oracle Fusion users are understandably interested in what the Oracle Fusion UI will look and act like. While the interface is still under development, there are a number of important user interface components and strategies that have already been decided:
Logical separation. Unlike traditional enterprise applications, the Oracle Fusion UI will be distinct from its underlying business logic. This will give users more flexibility to decide how information is presented, because presentation will not be tied directly to the application back end. "We're going to have a rich, interactive, and very robust interface that is much closer to a desktop environment, rather than the previous hypertext-oriented UI," says Oracle's Luke Kowalski. "We're moving to a model with drag-and-drop, partial page redraw, very fast updating, and context-rich pages. It's very exciting."
Standards. Oracle Fusion is moving to a standards-based UI stack, including new standards such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax)—a development technique that increases the speed and usability of Web applications and makes them more interactive. "With Oracle Fusion we're using an industry UI standard called JavaServer Faces so that we'll be delivering a product that's very standards-based but will also perform great," says Kowalski. "The solution will also be an Ajax-based solution and provide render kits that allow organizations to easily create interfaces for different devices."
Extensibility. "The Oracle Fusion UI will be second to none in its extensibility and the ability of our customers to customize it," says Kowalski. Employees will be able to use the interface to support their specific job roles: Managers will change business processes using a graphic interface, IT managers can customize the look and feel to match their enterprise, administrators can fine-tune security, and developers can rewire and extend the applications using Oracle JDeveloper.
Accessibility. "We have people devoted to the effort of making sure that our Fusion products are accessible and compliant with government regulations such as 508, the law that requires federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities," says Kowalski. The Oracle Fusion UI will also exceed industry standards for quality, design, and user-centered process in the software development lifecycle.
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"User experience is key to productivity, and that feeds directly into the total cost of ownership," says Ashley. "So it's important for us to make our products as effective and efficient as possible."
Modernizing the Interface
Many software companies might be content to save money on research and development and make minor changes to update the user interface. That's not the case with Oracle Fusion.
"I think it's really important to stress that this isn't just an incremental process where we take what we've got right now and make it a little better," says Mitch Stein, senior director of user experience for the Server Technologies group at Oracle. "Instead, we're trying to find places to make it a whole lot better while still honoring our customers and trying not to force too many discontinuities."
According to Stein, Oracle's usability team is improving interface capabilities to meet modern requirements and expectations. In the earlier days of Web applications, the UI environment was very rigid—changes on a Web page would require a complete (and time-consuming) redrawing of the page. Applications also tended to move the user out of context by jumping to new windows or pages without any indication of how they got there or how they might get back. When users wanted to update a data field, such a Web application would take users to a different page—and require a time-consuming redraw of the initial screen.
"The intent of a lot of the underlying UI components that we're building at Oracle is to keep the user in context instead of implementing a lot of flashing and shifting pages as a result of early HTML and Web limitations," says Stein. "Now we're able to provide much more dynamic behaviors right in the Web page itself. Instead of having to take you to another place, we might pop up a little window, or we might even relay out the interface dynamically and kind of zip open a little area."
According to Stein, users are accustomed to context-resilient behavior—such as using icons to give a hierarchical preview of a file system that expands to show the contents of a file folder. Such behavior is common in popular applications such as Windows Explorer. "We're modernizing the application interface to allow you to have a much richer experience," says Stein. "We're really working to improve the ability of the user to stay focused on what they're doing instead of being a slave to limitations of older-style browsers."
The result should be impressive. Using lessons from UCD, Oracle Fusion will feature better organization of information on the screen, making it easier for users to keep track of what they are doing. Performance will be crisper. Visual effects will help users keep better track of information. New UI flexibility will allow users to personalize their views, and Oracle Fusion will feature more-sophisticated ways of representing information—such as allowing users to sort lists or tables on the fly and personalize the presentation of information.
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| Figure 1: User Centered Design Process
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The Task at Hand
With usability, little things make a big difference. "When a company buys our product, like our CRM [customer relationship management] product for a call center, if using that product adds a minute to a three-minute call, we're actually increasing the cost of that call by a third," says Ashley. "That's why our investment in the advanced usability research and product development is critical."
Indeed, Oracle's investment in usability should lead to the user's lack of awareness of specific Oracle products. "I believe that very few people actually want to go home at night and say, 'That was a great business intelligence application I used today!'" says Ashley. "Instead, we'd like them to be able to go home and say, 'I managed four accounts today and I was really efficient and it was really great.' It's important for us that they focus on their actual job, and not on the tool. We believe that will be the biggest win for everyone."
Shaw concurs. "The proof is really when one of our employees is testing new software and says it will save them a lot of time in their job," she says. "If you hear that from an end user, then you know you've hit the mark."
| Usability Labs
Oracle's usability labs play a key role in learning what works in a user interface—and what doesn't. Oracle has 16 usability labs around the world, in places such as California, the U.K., and India.
The labs are typically used early in the process of developing user interfaces for customer requirements and manage a variety of interface- and customer-related functions. In addition to conducting focus groups, group task analysis, and wants-and-needs sessions, the usability labs also maintain and manage the design partners program, databases with information about technical and business-oriented users, customer advisory boards, training facilities and programs, beta customers and research, pilot studies, and usability surveys.
Customers visit the labs and do exercises that enable usability experts to define their job requirements. From those requirements, new interfaces can be prototyped using basic Web or graphic design tools or even paper. "We're using these types of techniques with Fusion, refining it right from the beginning," says Anna Wichansky, senior director of advanced UI for Oracle. "For example, we're already performing customer site visits and creating prototypes. We've already included some of
the user interface research to
create more-innovative and more-usable interfaces."
"The usability labs are really the linchpin of a user-centered design process that we use at Oracle," says Wichansky. She is not only in charge of Oracle's usability labs; she's also one of a team of researchers working on innovative user interfaces for future Oracle products.
Developing advanced user interfaces also requires some pretty neat technology. One of the most interesting tools in the usability labs is an infrared eye tracker. The device, which is smaller than a desk telephone, is placed next to a computer used by a lab participant and calibrated to measure and track the participant's eye movements as the participant navigates through software applications. These movements reveal when the UI is working for users—and when it is slowing them down.
"We can actually determine where users look first, how much time they spend gazing at particular sections of the screen and reading the words on the screen, or whether they go back and read the same words over and over," says Wichansky. "For example, that would indicate that they're having a problem comprehending what is written on the screen and maybe that it needs to be rewritten."
Oracle usability experts create draft UI designs and use the feedback from users to evolve the prototypes. There will often be two or three rounds of testing before the product is released. With Oracle Fusion, self-service components of the software are getting special attention with the goal of supporting users with little or no training. "The self-service areas of Fusion really have to be able to stand on their own in terms of being intuitive and communicating what needs to be done next," says Wichansky. "They have to have the right interaction model and the right visual design
and look competitive in the market. So, this user-centered design
process is really critical to the success of Fusion."
David A. Kelly (dkelly@upsideresearch.com) is a business, technology, and travel writer who lives in West Newton, Massachusetts.
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