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 focused on at Salesforce.com?
I manage the Platform UI Design Team at salesforce.com. Our team is focused on designing interfaces for the force.com platform that allow our customers to administer, customize, integrate and build applications to meet their specific needs.
Is there such thing as an Enterprise User Interface? What does it mean to you?
It’s all about context. The lines are blurring between the consumer and the enterprise, but at the end of the day, enterprise software needs to provide productivity, reliability and security (not necessarily in that order). At salesforce.com, we are guided by two key design principles: keep it in context and adopt the best of the consumer Web. There’s a lot of great innovation happening in the consumer space and much of it is transferable to the enterprise. For example, we’ve recently introduced inline editing, which allows users to make quick edits to a record without having to navigate to a separate edit page. However, we are careful about which design patterns we adopt from the consumer Web and we often tweak them to make sure they are “industrial strength”.
What makes a good UI?
The classic answer is, it depends. If a UI meets the needs of its target audience, both at a practical and an emotional level, then it has succeeded.
What are some examples of good and bad Enterprise UIs?
The same basic principles apply to enterprise UIs as they do to any other UI. To design a good UI you need to understand your users and their goals. Bad UIs ignore the user and merely expose underlying functionality and data models.
Why is enterprise software user interface and user experience been a lack of focus, historically?
In the past, there was a tendency to discount the benefits of a good enterprise user experience because the end user “has to use the software as part of their job”. This attitude started to change in large part because of the emergence of Software as a Service, which offers customers and their end users more freedom of choice. Customers don’t have to invest millions of dollars in infrastructure and integration costs that traditional client/server enterprise software requires and, as a result, switching costs are not as high. In this environment, user experience becomes a key differentiator because users are not locked in.
Do you see change occurring and if so, what’s driving that change?
Absolutely. Enterprise software is changing for the better by adopting successful models from the consumer Web and adapting them to the enterprise. In my mind, there are two key drivers for change. One driver is internal: UI designers, product managers and developers inside enterprise software companies see great ideas in the consumer space and apply them to enterprise software. Other drivers are external: End users are increasingly technology-savvy and have come to expect rich user experiences from their interactions with Websites like Amazon and Google, and want that same experience and ease of use with enterprise applications.
What’s uniquely hard about designing for enterprise software?
There are many things uniquely challenging in enterprise UI design. Certainly, there is less “freedom of motion” in an enterprise UI. It takes much longer for an entire organization to adapt to change than it does an individual. Change can also introduce unwelcome cost to the customer in the form of additional user training or decreased productivity due to a steep learning curve, so ease of use is paramount.
Scale is another big challenge in enterprise UI. By this I am not referring to technical scale, like number of servers or efficiency of code. Instead, I am referring to the management of large sets of data in the UI, whether it’s users, accounts, or anything else. Most consumer apps don’t need to scale to tens or hundreds of thousands of records and even enterprise UIs can start to buckle under the weight of these large data sets.
What do you hope to get out of the Enterprise UI Summit this week?
There are a lot of exciting changes happening in the Enterprise software space and I look forward to sharing ideas and inspiration with such a distinguished group of UI professionals.
