Go Big Always

Enterprise UI Summit Profile: Adobe’s Matthias Zeller

This week I’ll be profiling a few of the people attending Jive’s Enterprise UI Summit, which is Thursday & Friday in Aspen.

What are you currently focused on at Adobe?

I am a Group Product Manager at Adobe working in the New Business Innovations group. My mission is to bring the well know Adobe user experience for consumer products to the enterprise. My focus is a new product in development code-named Genesis which enables business users in the enterprise to mash-up enterprise applications, web applications and documents on the desktop and share and collaborate on these workspaces with others. In my previous role I was responsible for the Product Management aspects of the Adobe SAP alliance.

Is there such thing as an Enterprise User Interface? What does it mean to you?

An Enterprise User Interface is any UI which users use to access their enterprise applications (applications to run the business). However with the increased usage of web applications (Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc) by knowledge workers the line between Enterprise UI and consumer web applications is blurring. Most people I talk to associate enterprise application UI with terms like hard-to-use and ugly.

What makes a good UI?

A good user interface anticipates what a user wants to get done and helps him to get it done in the most efficient way. A good UI needs to be highly responsive, focus on the content and provide consistent usage patterns.

What are some examples of good and bad Enterprise UIs?

The Adobe internal directory application (build with Adobe Flex and AIR) is my favorite utility. The Adobe Experience Design team worked with our internal IT department to develop an app which has become extremely popular with every employee at Adobe. All the information I need is available instantly (even when I am offline). The navigation to access information like reporting structure and office location is very intuitive. Another good example is the work we do for the Genesis UI (since I am the Product Manager for it you don’t have to believe me, but just look at one of the demos). We leveraged known user experience models from the consumer space (including the Adobe Media Player) and applied them to managing business workspaces. Our user research showed us that knowledge worker loved the UI and found it easy to get started right away.

An example of a bad UI is the Adobe quarterly incentive planning tool. Every manager hates it (lucky are those who have an admin to enter the data for them). Just looking at it makes you feel we are back in the time of mainframe applications.

Why is enterprise software user interface and user experience been a lack of focus, historically?

I think there are two major reasons. Historically the decision makers for enterprise software were IT departments and higher management of the business unit who needed the software. The end user did not have a say in the decision. The focus was purely on feature and function (can the application handle all our business rules). Enterprise software companies were able to win big deals without focusing on UI development. However this is changing.

More and more purchasing decisions are now being directed or at least influenced by end users. With the availability of SaaS groups of users can even adopt software without the involvement of IT. The second reason is the sheer amount of screens a large enterprise software company needs to produce and maintain. For efficiency reason software developers implemented solutions which allow UI generation directly from the data model. Unfortunately often that leads to bad user interfaces.

Do you see change occurring and if so, what’s driving that change?

Absolutely. I think engaging an easy to use user interface has become a sales driver and competitive differentiator in the world of enterprise software.

What do you hope to get out of the Enterprise UI Summit this week?

First and foremost I am excited to meet other experts in the industry who have been pondering the challenge of enterprise application user experience. I am sure I will get a lot of new ideas which I can apply to my work. I also hope to demo the latest UI iteration of Genesis and get productive feedback for enhancements.