This %&$#?@! PLM Application!

Have you ever encountered bad user experience in a PLM tool? I have a few times. So how do we address user experience in enterprise software such as PLM Systems?

UI is only one part of UX

When thinking about user experience (UX) of an application you might associate it with words like nice and modern looking graphical user interface (GUI). But it is so much more – in its core it’s about understanding the end-users need and to make the work-tasks as simple, effective, and intuitive as possible. Level 1 is to address things such as consequent usage of interaction patterns, wording, icons and other features that you might associate with the GUI. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you will develop the right features. You might still miss the actual goal of your implementation.

Understanding the user and the context

So, back to what I considered core – it´s all about understanding the context and the usage. Is the target an expert user? Then it might be important to have an effective pixel-usage, and advanced features, which might have some threshold to learn, but which is motivated by the value it provides. Or, is it aimed for the broader audience, where it has to be intuitive, self-explaining and with zero thresholds? To understand this you need to more or less work in the same way as any business analyst, grasping the essence and details of the tasks that you are about to develop a support for. To know the business impact goal of the implementation is an important part of this, as it sets the framework for whatever feature or function you are about to develop.  You can probably implement “a thing” in hundred different ways but only a few of them will match the desired outcome (e.g. better overview, higher efficiency, transparency, or traceability).

Another important thing, which is put to its extreme when working with customers in the fashion industry (as I do now), is the amount of data that the user is exposed to, and the speed in which the user has to perform his/her tasks. This means that every click counts – if you do thousands of product developments per season you will have some demand on the tools which is supporting your processes. Things which normally might be considered annoying become critical issues. And bad performance becomes show stoppers as the users find other ways to conduct their daily work. If you think about it, it’s not any different to any other industry. It’s just that the situation is more extreme which makes UX a good focal point for efforts made to make life easier to the end-user.

Don't lay the load on the user

A typical trap is to make things over-complicated. This is often found in PLM tools. Tools providing out-of-the-box capabilities often take the path to provide a function which is as generic as possible, allowing as flexible usage as possible. This flexibility is also manifested in the fact that every screen comes fully loaded with features. Something that you most probably can either configure, or use preferences to adjust. The issue is that none of that is actually done to enhance the experience. Actually, you will most likely find this in a lot of highly customized or bespoke software as well, and for the same reason – it is hard to take decisions which limits your options even if it for a good cause; to keep it simple. In many cases you need to take a stand and choose a path for the usage of the software to make it work in a streamlined and effective way - by not taking the decision yourself, you force it upon the end user.

To quote Steve Jobs;

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

There is money to make from good design

The value of good design is not only about pleasing the end-user. Areas which contribute to a faster ROI are:

• Less need for support
• Less error prone
• Less need for user training
• More through-put
• More time spent on value adding tasks

But I have also heard some “softer” reasons for pushing for good design and that is to be able to appeal new, young, co-workers; you need to provide tools which don’t make the hair on their back stand up. That fight is not easy won as applications from the “consumer world” have transformed what we expect from an application in terms of usability. And mobile and cloud has done the same with availability, as we demand access from anywhere at any time.

What can we ask from the future?

I will not take the consumer and mobile path on this one, and I won’t take you to “star trek” millennia either…

Steve Krug’s book “Don’t make me think” is often mentioned when usability is discussed. Isn’t it time for someone to write the book “Don’t make me enter more information, please I beg you!”? I hope and believe that a lot of today’s tedious clicking and entering will be replaced by capabilities which will allow the user to shift focus from administrative to more value adding tasks. Aren’t we soon in the age of more intelligent PLM applications, which could enable more automated metadata creation? I'm not talking about mind-reading applications. It's more about utilizing the context in which the data resides, releasing data by moving out of the boundaries of native file formats, and borrow some from predictive coding. In short - don't make a human do the work that a machine can do.

Robert  Wallerblad
www.infuseit.com

*The title was inspired by the book "Jävla skitsystem" by Jonas Söderström