Customers Reveal Top Enterprise Software Usability Issues to Oracle

Author: Anna M. Wichansky, Ph.D CPE
Senior Director, Oracle Applications User Experience
Chair, Oracle Usability Advisory Board

Customers shared their top usability issues about enterprise software at a recent powwow in Oracle’s Conference Center in Redwood Shores, California. The occasion was the March 28, 2008, kick-off meeting of the Oracle Usability Advisory Board, a new opportunity for collaboration between Oracle, expert usability consultants, and customers, to impact enterprise software usability for the good. Twenty representatives of member organizations (full list) attended, including:

• Large corporations, such as Boeing and State Farm
• Mid-size companies, such as Hologic
• Small companies, such as Colorcon, Inc.
• Academic institutions, such as San Jose State University
• Government, including City of Las Vegas and City of Oakland
• Usability experts, such as Naviscent LLC and EchoUser

Representatives included CIOs, CEOs, architects, principals, and analysts directly responsible for enterprise software implementation in their organizations.

The Oracle Usability Advisory Board met on March 28, 2008
at the Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, CA.

“What are your top three usability issues with enterprise software?”

In addition to lab tours and presentations by Oracle, each member had the opportunity to present slides in a plenary session addressing the question, “What are your top three usability issues with enterprise software?” Members addressed not only their issues with Oracle, but with Peoplesoft, Microsoft, JD Edwards, Google, Open Source, and many other vendors’ products that are used enterprise-wide in their organizations. Oracle executives representing the Applications User Experience, Oracle Collaboration Suite, and the office of the Oracle Chief Corporate Architect were present and taking notes.

Some customers could fit their top three issues on a single slide. Others presented 10 slides plus screen images to illustrate their points. Many described detailed usage scenarios, user characteristics, and system configurations with version numbers which can be analyzed in detailed follow-up.

The five top issues are no surprise to usability professionals

Some customers were quick to say that in general, they did not find it difficult to use Oracle Applications. However, across the entire range of enterprise software, five main issues emerged:

• Customers perceive that the user interfaces of enterprise software are inconsistent and difficult to navigate.
• Customers think that some functionality is missing or inappropriate to their tasks.
• Performance problems with enterprise software are perceived to cause productivity losses to workers.
• Preformed workflows seldom conform to actual business processes.
• Collaboration is possible, but difficult.

The prevalence of these themes in various forms throughout customer presentations indicates that although some basic usability issues, such as consistency, have been addressed in current software, the software industry still has a long way to go to satisfy customers completely. One longstanding enterprise customer acknowledged the current version of her software could do a lot that previous versions could not; however, she was not sure the complexity penalty of these extra functions was worth the price users had to pay in learning and using the new software. Similarly, users were interested in what they called federated search, the ability to search across all modules, applications, and vendors, for information on their system. Integration between different vendors’ products was still perceived to be cumbersome, particularly with regard to applications and email, instant messaging, and other collaboration tools. Many customers were experiencing a hit in terms of software response times that was felt to impact worker productivity. They made interesting suggestions concerning performance prioritization schemes for enterprises running multiple applications.

Test participants at Oracle's Usability Labs engaged in a Group Task Analysis. Customer representatives were invited to participate in a similar group task analysis demonstration at the kick-off meeting of the Oracle Usability Advisory Board.

What about Web 2.0?

In setting the agenda for this session, we were expecting the majority of discussion to be about tagging, social networks, and other Web 2.0 features. We found that while Web 2.0 features and functions were certainly of interest, many customers at this point were still learning about them. They were not major wants or needs, except where they were perceived to solve existing problems. There were also some reservations expressed about security and privacy issues.

The results of the morning sessions enabled us to assemble working groups on three of these major themes. Oracle is now facilitating these working group agendas, which actively pursue the issues of the board member organizations to develop and propagate solutions. Some strategies will involve other vendors or organizations, which will provide major opportunities to move usability forward in next generation products for the entire software industry.