Blog

Why *This* Award Really Matters to Us

By Jenny Lam and Hillel Cooperman—Jul 6, 2021

Industry accolades come and go, but what matters most to us is the feedback we get from customers. We still have a lot of work to do, but we’re very proud that Redwood, Oracle’s next-generation design system, has won a San Francisco Design Week Award for user experience.

And while we’re proud of winning this award, we consider ourselves successful only if our customers are successful. We work to earn and re-earn that trust every day, and we’re grateful for the dedication, passion, and customer-focus of the entire team responsible for designing and putting Redwood into practice.

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Not just another design competition—where innovation meets social responsibility

San Francisco Design Week is the premier gathering of the world’s most active design community. This year, the competition’s goal was to encourage thought leadership by supporting designers whose works can contribute towards a positive future for society.

The Oracle design team came together with our product teams and made a commitment to excellence, mindful that this is more than just a single moment in time. The effort is ongoing and continuous. And our vision of a positive future is to contribute an enriching experience for people using business software to do their jobs.

Reinventing everyone’s experience with Oracle

Our purpose with Redwood is to bring state-of-the-art, consumer-grade user experiences to business applications, and to make that available across any device. The Redwood experience is not just for our user interfaces but touches every single interaction our customers and partners (and employees) have with the company. It’s truly a collective reinvention of how Oracle customers interact with technology and consume information.

Redwood starts with the premise that there is no reason the experience of using technology in a workplace can’t be as intuitive, polished, and delightful as the state-of-the-art experiences we all have in our personal lives on our phones, tablets, and laptops.

It’s past time to expect those same great experiences (and more) from the tools we use at work. The bar is high to be consumer-grade, and Redwood is designed to exceed that bar.

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What differentiates Redwood from our competitors?

  • Redwood is designed to understand you in the language you use best—words. We shouldn’t need to understand the arcane terminology and hierarchical systems technology vendors concoct. With Redwood, the software works to understand us and the words we use.
  • Over time, Redwood experiences learn and get smarter using our machine learning technologies. Anywhere we make choices, Redwood takes our role, context, and past behavior into consideration to make smart recommendations.
  • Oracle has a long history of being the best at storing and managing your critical data. Redwood makes it so that Oracle is also the best at letting you visualize that data by providing sophisticated insights to help you interpret what you see.
  • Finally, Redwood is not just a new user experience, but a series of tools, reusable components, and services that our customers can use to customize and extend their applications or even build their own. They can create Redwood experiences using the very same platform we use ourselves here at Oracle.
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For decades, business software has been considered to have inherent limitations on how good the user experience can be, because somehow enterprise scenarios are complex, or enterprise users are different. We don’t believe either of these things to be true. We didn’t win an ‘enterprise’ user experience award. We won the award for best user experience. And I think that may be the most important takeaway.

Our aspiration is not just in the technology space but being one of the best experiences customers have across all sectors. And every day, that’s what we focus on delivering.

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