Looking for reasons to tell your boss why your organization needs to join the Oracle Usability Advisory Board (OUAB)? Or why you need approval to attend one of its meetings (see the customer and partner requirements)? Well, try phrases such as "UX matters for our apps return on investment (ROI) now", "Announcement from the <your company's name> AGM about increased productivity", "Happy Workers going home early" or even "Oracle, the Apple of the Enterprise, why not come along, too?" Or show your boss this meeting report.
With OUAB your participation is about realizing and sustaining ROI across the entire applications life-cycle: from early input to designs and beta access to implementation choices that makes for great usage and task completion on the road or office, but also stakeholder involvement beyond end users, including integration and performance and how to measuring improved onboarding, adoption and support experience to show your decision makers and investors.
If you think OUAB is a boring meeting of aging people sitting around moaning about the grief of desktop order entry forms and shaking their heads when somebody says "Facebook" as they scroll through texts from the accounts department on their BlackBerries, well think again! Read what follows for a rich agenda, all designed to engage the audience in a thought-provoking and feedback-eliciting day of swirling interactions, contextual usage, global delivery, mobility, consumerization, gamification, and tailoring your apps implementation to reflect real users doing real work in real environments.
Foldable, rollable ereader devices provide a newspaper-like UX for electronic reading devices. Electronic devices and technology featured at OUAB Europe meeting in December 2012, but not as a way to wrap silicon chips. (Photograph from Terrace Restaurant in Oracle TVP by Ultan O'Broin. Nom.)
At the 7 December 2012 OUAB Europe meeting in Oracle Thames Valley Park (TVP), in the United Kingdom, Oracle partners and customers from all over Europe and Oracle staff from worldwide locations, stepped up to the mic and PPT decks with a range of facts and examples to astound any C-level UX skeptic. Over the course of the day we covered the breadth and depth of great UX in the enterprise (mobile or desktop workers, too natch); it was all part of a theme of a new contextual, flexible, simplified, never too fast or too usable, yet inherently personal way of engaging with users worldwide to enable them to deliver results for business: that means design stops only when the business problems is gone (so it's iterative then!). OUAB is about customers and partners knowing more about Oracle UX but also their own users and their tasks so as how to make design and technology transform work into a productive activity that users and bean counters will all be excited by.
The sessions together really gelled for me into a value-packed, engaging, cohesive event, for example:
1. Mobile design patterns and the powerful propositions for customers and partners offered by using the design guidance with Oracle ADF Mobile. Customers' and partners' developers existing Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) developers are now productive, efficient mobile developers too, applying proven UX guidance using Oracle ADF Mobile components and other Oracle Fusion Middleware in the development toolkit. You can find the Mobile UX Design Patterns and Guidance on Building Mobile Apps on OTN.
2. Oracle Voice and Apps. Now, this medium offers so much potential in the enterprise and offers a window in Fusion Apps cloud web services, Oracle RightNow and Nuance technology. Exciting science now stuff, customizable for your UX, and demoed live on a mobile phone. Stay tuned for more Oracle Voice features and modalities and how you can tailor your own apps user experience for your workers.
Oracle Voice demo. Voice makes perfect sense in the enterprise. Maybe moreso that in the personal world only. How many times can you ask Siri about the weather! See the Usable Apps YouTube channel for an Oracle Voice demo too. Photograph by Ultan O'Broin)
3. Oracle RightNow Natural Language Processing (NLP) Virtual Assistant technology (known as Ella): Wow! Discover how contextual intervention and learning from users sessions delivers a great personalized UX for users interacting with Ella, a fifth generation VA that uses real conversations to solve problems and prevent others.
Meet Ella. Demoing contextual NLP-based customer experience, an example of great Oracle RightNow technology solving real business problems in real-time using real context and learning from the user, ready for the next interaction too. Photograph by Ultan O'Broin.
4. BYOD Keynote: A balanced keynote address contrasting Fujitsu's explaining of the concept, challenges, and trends and setting the expectation that BYOD must be embraced in a flexible way, with the resolute, crafted high security enterprise requirements that nuancing the BYOD concept and proposals with the realities of their world of water tight information and device sharing policies. Fascinating stuff, as well providing anecdotes to make us thing about our own BYOD deployments. One size does not fit all.
5. Icon Cultural Surveys Results and Insights Arising: Ever wondered about the cultural appropriateness of icons used in software UIs and how these icons assessed for global use? Or considered that social media "Like" icons might be unacceptable hand gestures in culture or enterprise? Or do old world icons like Save floppy disk icons still make sense to users, worldwide?
Well the survey results told you. Challenges must be tested, over time, and context of use is critical now, including external factors such as the internet and social media adoption. Indeed the fears about global rejection of the face and hand icons was not borne out, and some of the more anachronistic icons (checkbooks, microphones, real-to-real tape decks, 3.5" floppies for "save") have become accepted metaphors for current actions. More importantly the findings brought into focus the reason for OUAB: to engage with customers and partners and understand their needs and issues so we can make great usable apps for them. We must obtain feedback though working groups and Board members, and others, before we build anything.
The Save icon is accepted now, despite its original iconic inspiration no longer being in use.
But what would you replace that icon with? Or do you even need to? OUAB discussed!
6. EReaders and Oracle iBook: What is the uptake and trends of ereaders? And how about a demo of an iBook with enterprise apps content? Well received by the audience, this session included a live running poll of ereader usage and revealed a lot about enterprise adoption of the technologies on offer and plans for same.
7. Gamification Design Jam: Fun, hands on event for teams of Oracle staff, partners and customers, actually building gamified flows, a practice that can be applied right away by customers and partners.
8. UX Direct: A new offering of usability best practices, coming to an external website for you in 2013. Find a real user, observe their tasks, design and approve, build and measure. Simple stuff to improve apps implications no end.
9. FUSE (an internal term only, basically Fusion Simplified Experience): Learn about, and see for real, the new Face of Fusion Applications: lightweight, simple to use, social, personalizable and fast. We saw three great live demos from HCM, CRM and ICT use cases on how these flexible, thoughtful UX designs brought to life in 100% Oracle ADF can be used in different ways to excite and delight users on different devices and deliver productivity to benefit the entire business.
The New Face of Fusion Applications. Demoed live at OUAB.
So, a powerful breadth and depth of UX solutions and opportunities for customers and partners to engage with and explore how they can make their users happy and benefit their business reaping continued ROI from those apps investments. And what a fun day too. Catering provided, superb TVP conference facilities, and a wonderful meeting host (me!). What more could you want as reasons to joining OUAB and attending!
Find out more about the OUAB and how to get involved here ...