Typically, enterprise software has a reputation for having bad user experiences. Although there are several articles written on the subject, you can probably come to this conclusion on your own. Was it easier to update your corporate intranet profile or your LinkedIn profile? Can you find something on your corporate intranet faster than you can on Google? Is managing your department spending easier with your internal accounting system or on Mint.com?
This paradigm affects all business professionals because of the inefficiencies associated with software that is difficult to use. The issue is highlighted by the amount of time we spend with our enterprise applications. I may know a few people that put in six hours a day on Facebook, but the majority of us spend hours toiling away on corporate applications; entering data, pulling reports, and most likely having no fun.
So how did we get into this mess? Software consumers tend to blame the vendors. “Why can’t it just work like Twitter?” Now that there are popular examples of sophisticated software design, users expect the same types of interfaces when they come to work.
On the other hand vendors tend to blame consumers. “We’d love to give your users a simple interface but your requirements are so complex…” The number of disparate and complex processes within a large application makes information management extremely difficult. To manage this growing complexity corporate IT spending has grown from 9% in the 1990’s to a whopping 22% today. Complexity usually means choices, and the more choices presented to a user increase the cognitive load to understand the screen, isolate their task, and complete that task without error.
Regardless of who is to blame, at SAVO we are always searching for ways to improve our contribution to enterprise design, by creating a software that’s as easy and intuitive to use as consumer software. We also have the added challenge of working within a multi-client application. If one customer wants a document preview to appear directly under the title, another would like to see the description before the content, and a third has a legal note that must appear before anything on the page…what is a designer to do?
One tactic we employ to ease our user experience is the reduction of choice, or at least, the perception that we have removed choices. Take for example our current upload page:
The first two inputs require the user to provide a title and a file for their new document. These choices are pretty straight-forward. The next area is called “Library Publisher” which potentially introduces a barrier for users. What if you don’t know what a “Library” is within the context of this application? The first option “Put this document in my private library” may raise additional questions. If I choose this option is that making the document private to my account or private from other companies that use SAVO? Is this location really private, or will my manager still be able to see it? Even the buttons at the bottom of the page have the potential to present confusion. Generally the primary action should be on the left, in a natural position as I read the form from top to bottom. Here we are initially given an option to “Cancel”, and then options to “Upload and Done” or “Upload and Edit”. What steps are left if I “Upload and Edit”? What’s wrong with just uploading the file and being done with it?
Sounds Complicated? That’s because it is complicated! These are the types of challenges that our design team embraces for each task you may attempt in SAVO.
When we examined this process for our new Forum feature we wanted to target these pain points such that:
- Selecting a library to publish to is easier
- Fewer options are presented in order to complete your task
For visibility reasons, questions also belong to SAVO libraries. However in this interface we abstracted the library choice and instead, asked our user to select a topic that best fits their question (topics are connected to libraries behind the scenes). Since questions tend to always be on a particular topic, there is less guesswork than presenting private vs. public library selection. If none of the choices in the topic drop-down fit your question, there is even an “I don’t know” option that will automatically route the question to a default topic. We also removed buttons for “Cancel” and “Ask and Edit”. This way, there is a single and clear action to complete your task.
While these changes may seem small, simplifying and/or removing choices can significantly influence the success rate when users are filling in forms. Nuances like these directly correlate to adoption and the ultimate success of each SAVO implementation.
So I’m sure our existing customers are wondering “So what about that document upload page?” We already have design improvements that are pending development. Stay tuned to those monthly releases!
