I’ve been watching the kerfuffle over Scoble’s post and chewing on the subject some more. As Thomas points out, we’ve been over this before but it still merits thought.

My perspective? I have little insight into how usability and interface refinements will make their way into ERP products as delivered because I don’t build the stuff. I’ve been responsible for implementing it, I certainly have had to use it, and now I make a fine living making it usable in big-ass companies.

I used to take the stance that there was no reason that enterprise software should be any harder to use than transactions at Amazon, eBay or [your favorite e-tailer here]. Those sites buffer a lot of complexity and multiple integrations from us tender humans.

I can name 2 differences that matter. First, the effect of the money trail – if users of commercial interfaces can’t complete their transaction, revenue stops. The enterprise doesn’t always have that level of motivation, depending on the function in question. Second, I’ve yet to see an organization that has deep global processes. Of course certain processes are mandated into localized versions, but more often its a reflection of the M&A activity that grew the organization on top of the regional variations.

Most often, companies fund a ‘vanilla’ ERP deployment and hope that their users can get through some training. It’s a big challenge in global organizations to quantify the variability, organize all the assets, apply security and personalization and make the stuff easier to use. Given the lack of budget for usability features and the heavy lifting it takes, it’s little wonder that most organizations aren’t taking the steps necessary, but why aren’t they demanding better user experience from their enterprise software?

In most cases I think it’s because they too have been conditioned to think that it must be complex. Perhaps this comes down from the days when the computers were behind glass and their keepers wore lab coats. All too often the IT community projects a certain machismo around ERP usability:

• It’s non-essential, ‘nice to have’
• It’s a ‘training issue’.
• Not an issue, everything passed UAT.
• We delivered the user requirements

Enterprises should share some of the blame and adding ease of use is to the features they’re requiring vendors to deliver. I’m seeing this begin to happen as ERP maturity evolves within companies. Users are speaking up, and in some cases where metrics are not being met it’s being linked to usability issues.

I’ve spent over half of the last 10 years helping enterprises get greater use of their eBusiness systems. Having been by turns a graphic designer, IT and development manager, user experience advocate and close ally of business, marketing and communications professionals and strategist mine is a particularly multidisciplinary approach.

I sense the beginnings of a change coming about, although I think it will be some time before it’s fully manifested in products and ultimately in the workplace. I’m still trying to hash this nascent trend out, so bear with me and please do call me out or remix these thoughts.

How did we end up here?
If I had to describe a typical ERP deployment (necessarily a fiction, there’s no such thing) , it would have the characteristics of an installation – scaled to the usage estimates, tuned to perform acceptably but not optimally under real-world conditions, configuration changes only, no customizations allowed by IT.

It took longer and cost more than projections. Business requirements were gathered but often ended up being deferred so the critical path could be cleared of dependencies that would incur further costs and/or delays, worsening the tension that already existed between the business audience and IT. A launch is achieved with one or two key business functions being supported. ‘Features’ are rolled out over multiple releases until all the intended functional solutions are live.

Now What?
What happens next is highly variable. Frequently budgets have been strained to the point where planned change management activities are scaled back or even eliminated in favor of some form of training. This is often remote and offered for a limited time after a launch event. Recorded training is available for new employees – if they can find it.

Professional users in the functional areas begin to struggle with the gaps between local procedures and the methodology of the system as delivered. Specific pain points arise: inconsistent data sources, multiple screens to perform single tasks, you name it. Workarounds abound – job aids and cheat sheets are circulated, and a body of underground tacit knowledge required to successfully perform job functions begins to arise. Eventually metrics begin to suggest that the ROI is not being met, and the blaming begins.

What’s to be done?
How it plays out depends on how the people responsible for the systems are rewarded. I’ve just re-read an interview with Donald Norman from 2000 where he took the usability profession to task for not understanding how business people typically get promoted, and emphasizing long-term benefits to the wrong audience. His point was if a manager gets a very narrowly defined task completed without making a mess of their P&L sheet for the year, they get promoted. Usability? Service quality? Benefit realization? Not my job – that’s for the next person to achieve.

Companies are frequently motivated to address problems arising from ERP deployments because senior management relies on them for critical processes and key data and they are not achieving the desired results. They assign that ‘next person’ to improve the system. Sometimes they call in folks like me.

Over time and through many engagements we’ve identified a spectrum of possibilities that improve in varying ways the business results that ERP supports, depending on a given company’s appetite for change and customizations. It’s not about user-centric design, although that’s a key component. It’s about tasks and goals and how people get through complex, lengthy processes. It’s about how the systems support the strategic goals of a company. Sorry to say, no system delivers that out of the box.

Vendors know the truth.
This challenge is very clear to ERP vendors. Their interfaces are brittle and monolithic; corporate IT experiences so much pain customizing and maintaining them that they have very compelling arguments against modifications. SaaS companies like Salesforce.com and Workday are invading their turf.

Oracle knows this, but they’re too busy rationalizing their product lines to be able to address it head-on yet.
SAP knows this and even though they provide tools for IT to tweak interfaces they are not used in may enterprises for the reasons above.

Change is coming…maybe.
One of the biggest challenges in any system is how to design for large numbers of people across many disciplines. Many of today’s applications try to accommodate just about everyone, creating extraordinary complexity. This applies as much to Microsoft Office products as it does to ERP. Word and Outlook are ‘feature-rich’ to the point of being ridiculous for must folks.

Other paradigms for improving the interface to ERP have been in play, most prevalent being the dashboard. They can be terrific for information consumers but they are often implemented with limited interactivity for decision support. A very compelling set of demonstrations was given at SAP’s Munich TechEd event showing interfaces and widgets that begin to decouple interactions and data manipulation from the ERP interface. Oracle and SAP both have dedicated groups looking at ways to exploit the best of Web 2.0 technologies and interfaces to the business solutions.

I’m not sure whether folks can cope with widgets floating around their computer desktops, monitoring data, work lists, or enabling faster/simpler transactions. But in general people prefer use-specific interfaces and devices over multipurpose ones. I commonly use the kitchen as a case in point. Your own kitchen probably has a range/oven, a microwave and some form of toaster-oven. 3 devices, all specialized interfaces for making food hot in a chamber.

Folks like Don Norman have envisioned more embedded computing and fewer general purpose systems in the future. In the last year specialized computing products have bloomed in the consumer space: digital picture frames at Target, iPhone and iPod Touch, Chumby. Perhaps the general public’s embrace of Web 2.0 interfaces (which seem to tend towards the single-purpose) is beginning to create sufficient demand that the product managers for ERP systems can contemplate adding them to feature sets. For some interesting insight into the dynamics of that process, see “Why 2.0 Didn’t Start in the Enterprise” by Paul Pedrazzi.

How does this impact the enterprise?
I see a shift away from the massive interface, the all-in-one portal and the soup-to-nuts dashboard in favor of compact, customizable and intelligent widgets, applets and services that can be called upon demand or pegged to a corner of the screen. I see a move away from the browser and the page paradigm that demands information architectures and navigation, towards a set of easily grabbed tools that I can use in combination or snap together like Lego blocks to solve my here and now business problem, and move on. The browser will still have it’s place because it’s a great interface for linear processes, but it will stop trying to be everything to everyone. I’m almost reminded of the March 1997 issue of Wired magazine, which breathlessly declared the death of the browser. I still have my copy.

When I watch the Demo Jam video I think that it’s some of the better thinking I’ve seen in this space in quite some time, but realistically speaking these innovations aren’t ready for general availability. Enterprises are often years away from major upgrades of ERP; in fact the days of the sweeping upgrade are probably past for many organizations. It’s incremental change that will be coming, so I don’t expect the landscape to change drastically in the next few years. But it’s an exciting trend and when these innovations begin to creep into the enterprise, I fully expect demand for more to rise.

Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Air and Mozilla Prism, that is. I wish I were clever enough to fit Yahoo Widgets into that title, but my brain just didn’t go there. In any case interesting things may be going on with interfaces. There’s a sudden confluence of ‘solutions’ aimed at pulling experiences out of the browser. This has some positive aspects, the browser remains a page-oriented environment and it demands a degree of bending to it’s will. In the enterprise space, there is great appeal to detaching meaningful experiences from the monolithic approach that ERP delivers.

Is there a downside? I can imagine desktops becoming cluttered with multiple disparate interfaces (You are in a maze of twisty little GUIs, all unalike) with a lack of context providing the conceptual or actual relationships between them. Do people even want to have all these little bits floating about? The proportion of folks who are able to manipulate their computing environments remains low, and I for one don’t believe that Millenials are somehow naturally equipped or even inclined to be more than consumers of services. In some quarters there seems to be an almost mystical attachment to the idea that young-uns are deeply skilled laptop Jedis. I’d like to see some real-world testing, my gut says that they can easily learn to use new apps and devices but they’re just as inclined to ignore customization as us dinosaurs. I grew up on TV, that doesn’t make me an expert on signal propagation or any other technical aspect of the medium. Just a consumer, sorry.

That said, I’m thrilled to see interest in alternative interfaces at places like SAP. I believe the real benefits will come when the UX and design people get to apply their disciplines. It feels like we’re at the start of some innovative thinking around enterprise application interfaces, and it’s about freakin’ time.

Google has changed another paradigm. A new front end to Google Docs and Spreadsheets is striking in many ways. First is a mashup of Folders and Tags – create a folder and it displays in a familiar left sidebar looking much like a Windows Explorer / Outlook folders view, click a folder and see it’s ‘contents’, etc. but they also behave like tags – select your doc and assign it to as many ‘folders’ as you’d like, search for tags, and so on.

Just yesterday I listened to Dave Weinberger on an IT Conversations podcast explaining why tags are inherently superior to folders in that they are attributes of the original item, being metadata they can be numerous without needing to be displayed, their inherent searchability, and so on. I love tags, so my first take on using this new Google mashup rattled my left brain a bit – why mess with the paradigm? I find myself explaining tags frequently when I discuss findability challenges in the enterprise. But folders are a concept that most folks grasp. Even though loads of people don’t quite get the Windows Explorer interface they are at least ok with the basic unit of the folder.

Google has solved one nascent problem – a lack of organizing tools around the document space – by giving folks something that behaves like the way they already handle documents. Looking closer, now there’s a higher level environment that has some attributes of the desktop – tools allowing me to manage and access my collection of stuff. They’ve just moved another step up the logical stack away from the application itself and provided a path to transition people from desktop to webtop. At the same time they’re allowing people to ease into the idea of tagging instead of filing by wrapping tags in a familiar look and feel.
This is a powerful little change that advances the state of their SaaS offerings and could expose tagging to a much broader audience. Whether you like the execution or not, it’s pretty damn clever. I wonder what the Blue Monster makes of it?

Thomas kindly gives us an overview of how SAP applies user experience (UX) discipline and practice in their product cycle. I’m always happy when he (or anyone) gets excited about UX.

At my new firm we get it big time. Tomorrow morning I take an early Acela Express to Philadelphia for a kickoff of an HR Portal strategy project. With me will be one of our senior UX consultants to demonstrate how we use extensive discovery of usability factors at the very beginning of a project to help drive our strategy – user interviews, surveys, data analysis and expert heuristic evaluations. She has equal standing with our technology lead and that’s a rarity. When UX is invoked it’s all too often closer to the finish line and nobody wants to make changes.

Thomas also touched on accessibility. Personally I think this one will become a compliance issue for companies sooner than they think. I predict it will not be long before general commercial entities will be required to provide accessible enterprise services in the same manner as governmental sites are currently. It’s not hard or expensive to accomplish accessiblity unless you find yourself in a crash course to remediate. Best practices in accessibility can be integrated into design and coding standards so it is a natural part of the process. Bottom line, it’s the right thing to do.

I use Google’s personalized home page. This week Google enabled ‘themes’, an interesting break in their graphical standards. I find myself wondering why they went forward with this – notwithstanding a few playful tricks they’re little more than window dressing. The selections are limited and lean towards the cartoonish. I’m not critiquing the designs; my point is that if Google is going to allow us to tweak the UI I’d like to see more substantial controls like allowing modules to span multiple columns for better readability or changing font sizes, backgrounds or colors on a per-module basis.

Kathy Sierra creates personas for applications. Not only amusing as hell, but insightful as always.

Two weeks ago I picked up Audi’s new Q7 SUV. It’s my third Audi, having had an A6 sedan for the last few years and the A6 Avant (wagon) prior to that, along with various euro-SUVs. I love Audis and the Q7 seems to be a great vehicle on all counts except for one glaring problem. German automakers like Audi, Mercedes-Benz and BMW have adopted a master controller for many functions in the car. Audi has MMI, BMW has iDrive and Mercedes calls it COMAND. The thinking is to provide access to controls and settings while reducing the ‘confusing’ array of dashboard controls.

Changing a radio station or CD track requires multiple steps. At worst the driver needs to select a function via one of eight buttons surrounding a knob, turn the knob to select a menu item and press the knob to select the function. If you are already in that function, you eliminate the intial button push but still have the turn and click. I have to take my eyes off the road frequently to check my selections. No matter how close to my line of sight the display is I’m no longer aware of what’s happening around me.

I acknowledge that these systems are known to require either long or steep learning curves. I want to give it a chance, but I hate it. Controls for vehicles need to be direct and avoid visual diversion beyond feedback for aiming at a control. I acknowledge that these systems are known to require either long or steep learning curves. I want to give it a chance, but I hate it. A system that complicates simple actions and requires learning to perform the same functions I perform simply and directly in my other vehicles is flawed and is exposing me to risk. My wife is completely intimidated by it.

In my last post I made reference to Thomas’ reference to enterprise systems as akin to broccoli – not as much fun as ice cream, but way more nutritious. I want to comment a bit more about his post and the Redmonk Radio podcast he was on. Go read and listen, it’s good stuff.

Thomas, I enjoyed your posts and the podcast, even though it took me 3 days to get through it all! In the work you’re doing with the Design Services team you’ve experienced firsthand how empowering it is to take a user-centric perspective to solving business and application challenges. Folks new to the process usually come out revved up and excited. And you’ve discovered what fun we can have if we take that approach into as many situations as possible.

Thomas comments in the podcast how he imagines UI to be like fashion, and he’s on the right track. UI, like all graphic design, is subject to the tastes of time and place. I know many designers who have excellent usability sensibility but even with that in place it’s a single yet key component of the total experience. In the same way, it’s not about Web 2.o widgets or shiny logos. It’s about getting rid of some of the messy and annoying administrivia with elegant, unobtrusive interfaces that don’t call attention to themselves but blend into the process.

At our company we’re deep in the goal-setting process. As an aside – it’s interesting to be responsible for delivering the service as well as taking part in it. I have an exciting set of goals for this year. We’re to be change agents, sharing the secrets of user-centered design with our business relationship managers and the development teams’ business analysts. We’re to continue our work in enhancing the user experience past the user interface layer out to the training, learning and support materials, down into the service centers and voice response systems. We’re embedding our practice in the development lifecycle to ensure that it becomes part of the fabric. I didn’t expect it but this year it seems I’ll be a teacher.

Yesterday was my son’s 11th birthday. He got a few new games for his Nintendo DS, and when he went to check them out he yelled out for me to “check this out!”

In the setup of the DS you enter your birth date, and it very dutifully displayed a splash screen when he started it wishing him a Happy Birthday, replete with famous Nintendo game characters. Needless to say he was absolutely delighted by this simple bit of ‘personalization’.

Why don’t our applications do this? Why is it so hard to build anything beyond the most basic and broad personalizations into our systems? We know a lot about each user, and we can infer even more. Besides adding efficiency and eliminating unnecessary distractions, why can’t we delight our users? Until we have the same narrow-margin mindset that makes Nintendo and Amazon go our of their way to keep their users happy we will continue to be broccoli, as Thomas puts it.