A few years ago I worked with a customer who didn’t like their ERP system. They found their ERP system difficult to use and as a result their people were unhappy and some left the company. The software was being blamed for bad business performance and was a focus of mutual loathing by the staff. There were internal calls to rip out our software and buy something else so everyone was under pressure.
This company felt they’d bought the wrong product, we wanted to prove they’d brought the right product, so we send in a few consultants to understand what was going wrong. The consultants worked hard to understand how to make these people happy. What they found was a number of simple usability issues that was causing big issues. Let me give you an example; an organizational level in this ERP application is “Plant”. This level refers to a manufacturing facility and sits under the “company” level, to most people in industry this is a pretty common explanation. This company was aligned to the UK Construction Industry where the term “Plant” refers to mechanical equipment such as excavators, tippers and small tools such as drills. As a result the people in this company couldn’t get their heads around why their regional office was a pneumatic drill or why they’d post an invoice to a dumper truck. There are many more examples that I won’t bore you with.
We made a number of small but important changes and made these people an awful lot happier, especially when they were confident that they were buying concrete for their regional office and not a digger. As a result the relationship slowly started to turn around until someone else bought the company and they ripped the system out anyway.
I feel strongly about software design. I’ve felt the frustration of poorly designed software with repeated visits to unhelpful help files and hours of random clicking to find what I know has been masterfully hidden by a developer under the guise of what they call logic. So many of us spend hours in front of our PC’s so good software design makes a big difference to our daily lives, bad design can push you as far as resignation, pretty extreme, but it does happen.
Working within Dynamics has been an exciting time as we release more role based user interfaces. The point is to move away from standard UI’s to focused UI’s that are based on business processes and tasks, organized around how organizations create value and how people fundamentally get their jobs done. Much has been written about how our usability teams spend days with customers understanding how they actually complete work. We’ve learnt that too many people enter data into an application as a requirement of their role, not as an enabler to get a job done. All of our software is fundamentally changing to accommodate a user’s role so we design around processes and tasks instead of “one size fits all”. The effect is amazing and has everyone who sees it wide eyed as we’re changing the way people in business use technology.
Have a look at the following links to see what I mean. Please let me know what you think.
http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2006/03-27convergence.asp for BillG’s Convergence presentation that has a demo of our new UI.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2006/feb06/02-20Dynamics.mspx for Dynamics Snap, a set of Office System plug-ins for ERP and CRM.
