By Madhuri Kolhatkar, Oracle Applications User Experience
Enterprise applications are often critiqued for being too complex and difficult to use. But if one can understand the customer journey that post-sales enterprise implementations go through, such as configuration, customizations, and extensions, then it is not hard to understand how the design focus is lost. Enterprise implementations are typically technology-focused. Consultants and IT professionals deliver what is required by the business, but end users often experience an application that does not meet their needs in terms of user experience.
Oracle’s Applications User Experience team incorporates user-centered design process into our shipped products. Our customers often tailor these enterprise solutions to fit their needs. If our customers used our user-centered design thinking in the implementation, the result of their tailored implementation is far more likely to result in more productive users, and deliver the efficiency everyone wants with a new enterprise solution.
To meet this goal, the Oracle Applications User Experience team has created a program called Oracle UX Direct to provide customers, partners, and consultants in the enterprise industry with design best-practices and tools that they can leverage to make their enterprise implementations more successful. By introducing design thinking during the implementation stage, our customers have the opportunity to create a solution that best fits the needs of their users from the beginning.
Visit the UX Direct website to learn how to make your implementation more usable and productive for your users.
Just to illustrate the benefits of introducing design thinking into an implementation, I want to share a story from one of my experiences working with customers. An international organization had implemented Oracle’s recruitment application for Human Capital Management to increase their global workforce. They converted their 50-page, paper-based, new-hire application to an online form collecting detailed personal information. However, no one was using the application, and there were no submissions from applicants, even in a downturn economy. The customer requested our support to investigate why the product was not successful.
After conducting some user research with both internal and external employees, we found that a lot of questions asked in the online form were not applicable to an applicant. We went through an exercise with the users to prioritize and define the key fields they used and we redesigned the user experience based on what the users actually wanted. The result was astonishing. Resumes flooded the human resources department. This was the result of following a user-centered design process.
Madhuri Kolhatkar, Senior Director
Our program, UX Direct, tells you how to introduce a user-centered design approach into your implementation. You can use our step-by-step design process to add design thinking into your development process. We also provide a useful tool kit and showcase best practices to inform your designs.
We plan to extend and refine this repository of information and create a community that will change the way enterprise applications are implemented. Check out what our partners and consultants are already saying about UX Direct in VoX, where you will also see new additions to the UX Direct website.