These
pictures have been shot in Paris, France, near my house. A urban earthwork has
been temporarily stopped for six months: big bags filled with soil are still
waiting to be used for filling the holes protected by a barrier.
And nature
did its job: seeds brought by the wind, rainy weather during spring and early
summer… In August, the result is a
wonderful wild flower bed.
How does
this bring us to software? Well, this illustrates the fact that nature is able
to adapt even to not very good conditions, do the job, and produce a nice
result.
And this is
the topic I want to discuss today: computer usability. If you design software
with an acceptable but not optimal user interface, users will adapt to it and
get their job done as long as a minimal set of conditions are fulfilled: that
training has been given, and that the system manages to execute, even in bad
conditions, what is requested.
Let’s go a
step further: if you get back to your users several months later, some of them
will complain about the user interface, but most of them will be comfortable
with it, just because they have become accustomed, and sometimes even addict to
the twisted ways the job is sometimes done with your software.
This is
probably why user interface design is an activity that needs to involve new
users and should not be left to developers. Developers are aware of all sorts
of nice tricks like right clicking to open menus with dozens of options, or
playing with a wide range of buttons on a bar; they know the software, they use
it efficiently and they find the user interface compelling. And skilled, long
time accustomed users do not complain about it either.
I’m working
for Sage, and at Sage, user experience is a value we cherish, because this is
the main condition of effectiveness for customers who need to get their job
done simply, quickly, and accurately.
In the Sage
ERP X3 team, our flagship mid-market product team, usability is a key factor to
success, and can still be enhanced. This is why, two years ago, we started an
important project on the user interface. To design the new UI, we built a small
team starting from a blank sheet, including designers and usability
specialists, and last but not least… no accustomed Sage ERP X3 users.
The new UI
is based on the following principles:
- Intensive use of browser capabilities, with a very light shell: no more huge button bars or ribbons; instead, a lean presentation on pages that can scroll, grow and shrink; strong reliance on browser features that users are familiar with: hyper-links based on explicit texts, only a few well-known icons (home, tool), shortcut bar, search, back button and access to history; a lightweight and sober user interface where links are displayed contextually, for instance when hovering over the lines in a grid.
- Compatibility with all recent browsers and devices (mobiles, tablets) with a good adaptation to these devices and their capabilities.
- Ability to stop an activity because of an external interruption, and to resume it later at the same step even if the data entered hadn't been validated (we call this a pending draft).
- Not blocking input if a mandatory field cannot be filled immediately (it will be filled later and maybe by another user working on the pending draft).
- Personalization mode that allows the users to rearrange the screen layout and possibly share it with other users in a very intuitive way.
- Search as a main tool to access to data and functions managed by the ERP.
- Collaboration tools for teams of users to share documents and pages layouts.
