The Pyramid of Customers’ User Experience Issues at COLLABORATE09
Jeremy Ashley, Vice President, Applications User Experience
with Misha Vaughan, Architect, Applications User Experience
I managed to leave a rainy San Francisco only to get wetter in the humidity of Orlando, Florida. The conference was spread out across the exceptionally large Orange County Conference Center. This year the Applications User Experience team was running a number of presentations:
- User Experience Innovations, Jeremy Ashley & Patanjali Venkatacharya
- The Future of Enterprise is with the Mobile Workforce, Lynn Rampoldi –Hnilo
- How the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne User Interface Continues to Evolve, Madhuri Kolhatkar
- Oracle Applications Usability Testing, Velynda Prakhantree
We also had an eye-tracking system set up in the demogrounds on the main exhibit hall to measure the usability of two Web sites for customers: usableapps.oracle.com and oracle.com. Our new Tobii system allowed users to walk up and get calibrated for eye-tracking in just a few seconds.
Fig 1. Michal Kopec and Joyce Ohgi demonstrate Tobii eyetracker at COLLABORATE09, Orlando, Florida, May 2009.
Our walk-up users responded to the uncanny way their eyeballs were represented on the screen — you see these two animated white dots peering at you. Once they got beyond that, we managed to gather some great data on how users search for information on content-based Web pages. One thing I always enjoy doing at these conferences is walking around the exhibition hall floor when few other people are there first thing in the morning. I chatted with several consulting organizations on the COLLABORATE09 exhibit hall floor. I talked to them about their end users and feedback they have received on user experiences of Oracle Applications. The feedback fell into three different categories that can be described as a pyramid of issues (Fig 2). 1. Widget-level issues were at the bottom of the pyramid and the biggest issue. This kind of issue is a specific concern about a particular feature on a page. An example is the need for “row-level validation on tables” from JD Edwards. I would guess that more people have their individual wish-list items that were at a component level. The majority of feedback fell into this category. 2. The training time needed for some of the products ranks as the second biggest issue. Customers were looking for ways to get their end users up-to-speed faster. This is especially challenging when trying to deliver training to end users across the current suite of applications. 3. Consumer-level user experience was the third category of feedback, and the smallest. In general, customers would ask, “Why isn’t it as easy as some of the other things I use?” For example, “Why doesn’t search work like Google?” Another request is for a purchasing experience similar to Amazon. Attending COLLABORATE is always a fascinating experience, because we get to see a broad section of our users all in one place, rather than the individual sessions we run in a usability lab. You get a much better feeling of how the wind is blowing for customers. As always at COLLABORATE, we experienced a vibrant user community who is very enthusiastic about our products and equally enthusiastic about giving their feedback.
Fig 2. The pyramid of user experience issues.
Related posts