I'm becoming more convinced that the User Experience really is something you should care about. It can seem a little ethereal, listening to people talk about interface design, user delight, and the like. It's not something solid like packet loss metrics or protocol standards compliance. But it's ultimately what the whole thing is about.
The topic is picking up steam at our events as well. At Enterprise Connect last month, our general session on User Experience--featuring execs from Unify and frog--was well-attended and well-received. Likewise, here at Interop Las Vegas, a User Experiece session in the Collaboration Track that I chair filled up the room with an engaged enterprise audience.
The user experience has always mattered, of course. But the consumerization of IT has set a new standard for enterprise communications applications to live up to, and BYOD has given users an option if those apps fail to live up to the consumerized standard.
Besides the sheer attractiveness of device interfaces like the iPhone/iPad paradigm, there's the new way that users consume applications. Jack Jachner of Alcatel-Lucent, one of my panelists here at Interop, pointed out that, "In the consumer world, there's a lot of things that fail, and fail quickly." You can download an app for free or for a buck, and if it's not what you expected or hoped for, you just delete it, he noted.
"The cost of entry is low, so the cost of exit is low," Jack said. User expectations for applications have adjusted accordingly.
My other panelist was Ramy Nassar, director, telecom services at Myplanet, a design firm that creates user interfaces. Ramy described the process that Myplanet uses: It starts with something called "story mapping," a process in which the most high-tech tool used is a post-it note. Here's how the process goes:
The company works with its client to ascertain customer "stories," as distinct from features. Ramy explained the difference with an analogy to Microsoft Excel: Creating a pie chart is a Feature; the Story behind it is that a user wants to display information visually.
"A feature assumes solutions to a problem without thinking about the problem itself," Ramy explained.
So for any particular application, Myplanet collects about 20 of the most common user "stories," that is, what users are trying to do with the application. Then they get all team members together--not just the developers, but the CMO, Web App developers, salespeople, whoever. Then they ask each person to sketch, by hand, what they think the interface should look like. The participants are not allowed to use their electronic devices in this process--Sharpies and paper are the tools of choice.
The salesperson may not know how to draw a computer interface, but the exercise helps draw out from her what she wants in the interface--what would make it really useful. Once the team has gone through this process for a couple of hours, Myplanet's designers expect to have a set of ideas about what users need to do with the application (the stories), and how they'd like for it to work (the interface drawings). They can then translate that into a technically workable user interface.
Telecom and IT people have always had to worry about the user experience. This has always had to be translated into PBX-style "features". In the past, that's meant arranging for training when a new phone system was installed or a new enterprise application rolled out.
But as users find easy-to-adopt alternatives to the systems that the enterprise wants them to use, there needs to be more work on the front end--of both the UC application itself, and of the process used in creating it.
