improving usability with oracle
DESCRIPTION
I am presenting these slides to Oracle on 5 May in support of my blog post at http://markmorrell.wordpress.com at their first Usability Board Europe meeting.TRANSCRIPT
Oracle usability board Europe founders meeting
Mark Morrell – BT Intranet manager
http://markmorrell.wordpress.com
© British Telecommunications plc
Some things you might not know about BT......
• BT operates in over 170 countries as one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services. We provide networked IT services, local, national and international telecommunications services, and higher value broadband and internet products and services.
• Sorting out spam - Around 90 per cent of e-mails on the internet are spam. BT introduced the world's first fully-automated 'spam buster' system in October 2006.
• Financial centres across the globe - 60,000 traders in over 800 trading firms across 51 countries rely on BT’s voice applications and integration technologies.
© British Telecommunications plc
Oracle applications BT uses
• E-Business Suite• Oracle UCM 10GR3• PeopleSoft• Siebel• BEA• WebLogic• …..and many, many, more!
© British Telecommunications plc
Out of the box
• Conflict: while organisations want usable applications, developers want systems they can maintain and upgrade.
• Out of the box usability is more important than providing developers with extra widgets to add features and functions which may (or may not) be implemented well to aid usability.
• It should be the default (and least effort) to deploy interfaces that have high usability.
• Configuration should be ‘easy’ and ‘safe’.
© British Telecommunications plc
What good usability looks like
Position inputs forms, labels, buttons and error messages appropriately:
Error messageError
Error messageError
© British Telecommunications plc
Managing usability
• Every time a system generates an error message somebody has just wasted your organisation’s time trying to do the wrong thing.
• It’s not enough to stop an error being submitted to the database. You should aim for nobody trying to enter that data in the first place
• Systems should collect usability metrics by default, and as much as possible, so the business can correct ‘wrong turnings’ in navigation, buttons clicked and then undone, fields left un-entered, etc.