Author: Anna Wichansky, Ph.D CPE Senior Director and Chair, Oracle Usability Advisory Board

The Oracle Usability Advisory Board held its organizational meeting in the Oracle Conference Center at Redwood Shores, California on March 28, 2008. In attendance were representatives of the following companies: Agilent Technologies, Inc, Berlin Packaging, Boeing, Boise, Inc., City of Las Vegas, City of Oakland, Colorcon, Inc., EchoUser, Franklin Templeton Investments, Hologic, Naviscent, San Jose State University, Santa Clara University, and State Farm Insurance. Representatives included CIOs, IT Directors, Business and Program Directors, a University Controller, and Architects and Analysts implementing Oracle solutions. Usability experts from Naviscent and EchoUser, two user experience consulting firms in the Bay Area, also lent their expertise to the discussions.

The kick-off meeting was a full day. The theme of this meeting was worker productivity and Web 2.0. Customers brought slides and addressed the group with their top three enterprise software usability issues in the morning session. Oracle Director of Product Marketing Brennan Gaunce gave a presentation on worker productivity with email and showed a future version of Oracle Collaboration Suite. Customers discussed and provided inputs to the planned design and functionality.

Oracle Corporation The Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, Calif., was the site of the first meeting of Oracle’s Usability Advisory Board in March 2008.

After lunch three working groups, which were based on customers' top usability concerns, addressed the following topics: Web 2.0 Technologies (e.g., social networking, tagging, mobile solutions), Integration and Performance, and Consistency and Design of the user interface. Jeremy Ashley, Luke Kowalski, and George Hackman, all Oracle executives in User Experience, facilitated these groups.

The day wrapped up with a tour of the Oracle Usability Labs at headquarters, led by Senior Lab Manager Jatin Thaker. The labs are an 18-room, 2,500 square foot facility with office, focus group, competitive testing, and visualization research configurations. Customers participated in a group task analysis, and observed eye-tracking studies being conducted on prototypes of the Oracle Fusion Applications software.

Detailed minutes and a summary slide presentation have been circulated to the board, and all working groups have action items to follow up before our next meeting. These items include submission of relevant screen shots and off-line meetings with our executive facilitators to clarify and describe usability issues that surfaced in the discussions. These issues will be escalated to the appropriate development heads at Oracle.

A summary of the top enterprise issues our board identified will be published as a feature article on usableapps.oracle in the near future.