Who am I referring to exactly? \u00a0 After all even the IT developer who builds and maintains the enterprise system is an employee of the business. \u00a0In fact, I mean folks that are not IT employees. \u00a0\u00a0I am referring to people whose primary knowledge is the business of the enterprise, and not computer related skills.<\/p>\n
For instance, she is a certified underwriter of farm policies. \u00a0She is not expected to know SQL. \u00a0She is not expected to be able to setup CRON jobs, or put together a Lucene query, or even an advanced Google query. \u00a0She does not tune the Oracle database where her policies reside.<\/p>\n
What does it mean for such employees to have good user experience?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
At the outset, the common characteristics, as described in these posts, apply to business folks too.<\/p>\n
Besides these, there is a perspective that applies to business folks specifically, I believe.<\/p>\n
Business resources must really only need training, experience, and expertise in the business, and not in whatever enterprise-wide computer system that is in place.<\/p>\n
For instance, an underwriter should be able to come into a new insurance company, and knowing no more than how to use a keyboard, mouse, and perhaps a touch screen interface, and without formal training, should be able to very quickly learn and be productive using the existing enterprise system.<\/p>\n
Anything the business resource has to learn, she must be able to learn painlessly, by just using the system.<\/p>\n
The interfaces that the business user encounters must be a clear, natural, and seamless representation of her knowledge of the business. \u00a0 The system should guide the user down paths that are instantly familiar, and obviously correct.<\/p>\n
The enterprise system must leave little room for mistakes. \u00a0 Even when the mistakes happen, they must be caught early, and there must be little or no cost. \u00a0This is essential to facilitate experimentation, and self-learning.<\/p>\n
You know that the user experience is good when the enterprise system recedes into the background.<\/p>\n
The computer system must not register in the user’s mind as an obstacle, as a challenge, or as anything at all that is above and beyond her knowledge of the business.<\/p>\n
Granted, regardless of how convoluted a system is, once a user learns it, the system will recede into the background. \u00a0That is almost unfortunate, because that is how a lot of clunky systems come to be.<\/p>\n
However, say you have to make a change to the system. \u00a0Or say you want to replace the system. \u00a0 How much resistance do you encounter? \u00a0If the business complains about having to learn a whole new system all over again, your user experience is suspect.<\/p>\n
To put it another way, your system’s interfaces must not add any cognitive burden, beyond that which the business expertise itself requires.<\/p>\n
Good solution design begins with effective business analysis. \u00a0Before diving into solutions, business analysis must first describe the essential business problem. \u00a0Volere<\/a>, a Requirements and Business Analysis consultancy has a good definition of such analysis<\/a>, which it calls ‘systemic thinking’. \u00a0To paraphrase Volere, you want an understanding of the essence of the business, without being prejudiced by any solutions, whether digital, or the old-fashioned kinds.<\/p>\n There are folks with the expertise to take the description of the essence of the business that systemic business analysis produces, and design a system with the characteristics described above.<\/p>\n Much of this expertise has been codified, as guidelines, patterns, and frameworks, which a competent generalist can learn as necessary.<\/p>\n Here is a list of resources that must serve as our guides.<\/p>\n Further, design is an iterative process, which will include the following sort of cycle.<\/p>\n As this suggests, besides the design expertise, you have to be able to repeatedly construct, deploy, review, and change these solutions quickly.<\/p>\n Construction skills include the following.<\/p>\n You have to have the infrastructure and the skills for continuous integration, and continuous release.<\/p>\n Part of the review capabilities must include the ability to run usability tests.<\/p>\n Finally, there will be times when interfaces will have to change deep into the construction of the system. \u00a0Your engineering must be such that the interface can change quickly, without adversely affecting the backend. \u00a0You never want to say to the client – “It is too late to make that UI change. \u00a0You should told us this earlier,”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Business employees Who am I referring to exactly? \u00a0 After all even the IT developer who builds and maintains the enterprise system is an employee of the business. \u00a0In fact, I mean folks that are not IT employees. \u00a0\u00a0I am referring to people whose primary knowledge is the business of the enterprise, and not computer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[24,8,40,18],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":361,"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions\/361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}In a lot of my past work, the product of business analysis included \r\nsomeone's notion of a solution too, typically a user interface \r\ndesigned by folks with knowledge of the business, and good intentions, \r\nbut not much else. \r\n\r\nFolks with the expertise (in user experience design) to translate the \r\nessential business rules, processes, and outcomes, into a transparent \r\ncomputer solution, never got a chance to understand the business at all. \r\nResult, more often than not, avoidable errors, unnecessary iterations, \r\nand ultimately, an interface, that was not useless, but that was less \r\noptimal than it had to be.\r\n\r\nThese were common refrains - \"They will get used to it\", \"This is a \r\ndocumentation issue\", \"This is a training issue\", etc. All telltale signs \r\nof user experience that has room for improvement.<\/pre>\n
Human interaction design and construction<\/h3>\n
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