Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) News

I’m no UX expert, but it’s a subject I’m interested in. The contents of this post is me forwarding (with permission) the latest OAUX newsletter.

NEW OAUX STRATEGY AND ROADMAP EBOOK: The OAUX team’s updated cloud UX strategy ebook contains information about what guides the design of Oracle’s cloud UX as we continue to evolve. It is based on our research with Oracle’s applications users, and offers you a glimpse at the roadmap and where we’re planning to invest time and resources. Download a copy at tinyurl.com/UXstrategy.

HOW PARTNERS ARE TAILORING UX FOR CUSTOMERS: Perhaps you’ve already seen our recent post on Oracle platinum partner Boxfusion Consulting, which worked with members of the OAUX team to build a custom solution for a customer based on Oracle UX design patterns. Boxfusion has written more about the project and offers screenshots of what they built.

R13 UX HIGHLIGHTS: Have you had a chance to review what you’ll find in Release 13 of the Oracle Applications Cloud? This release leverages the flexibility of the cloud to give customers more control of the cloud’s user interface (UI). Learn more about UX highlights of R13:

NOW AVAILABLE — Oracle Conversational UI for the Enterprise RDK: The OAUX team announces the release of another RDK in a post on the OAUX Blog, “Oracle Conversational UI for the Enterprise Rapid Development Kit (RDK).” Conversational UIs are enterprise-level chatbots that can help streamline a workflow. For more about conversational UIs, see this post on the OAUX blog.

TIMELINE FOR VIRTUAL REALITY: Are you wondering how virtual reality (VR) might be integrated into your company’s software? Tawny Le, a member of the OAUX Emerging Technologies team, or The AppsLab, writes about her research into VR and where it will fit in enterprise systems. Her answer may surprise you.

MORE EMERGING TECH: Check out this short video on Instagram, where one of our OAUX developers moves a Sphero ball through a maze using a Muse headband. There’s also a new post on TheAppsLab blog about using push notifications with the Amazon Echo and devices like it.

Cheers

Tim…

OAUX Latest News

Here’s the latest OAUX News posted by Vikki Lira in the OAUX Newsletter. If you take a look at the OAUX Twitter account you will see they are having too much fun! 🙂

OAUX STRATEGY – OPTIMAL UX DESIGN: Jeremy Ashley, group vice president for the Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) team, talks about people and their patterns, and how that’s important when designing the Oracle user experience (UX), in a new post on Forbes.com’s OracleVoice blog.

WHAT CUSTOMERS NEED TO KNOW: Read about Rightside, an Internet company, in this new post I’ve written on the OAUX Blog. They describe their Oracle ERP Cloud implementation and a user experience they call “modern” and “easy to use.”

THE INTERSECTION OF WORK AND PLAY: Sometimes work can also be play – and guess what, that’s good for the worker and for the work. Read this new article about how work and play intersect in the research conducted by our emerging technologies team, the AppsLab. I recommend visiting their blog to read up on recent posts on the developer experience and fun with Facebook.

NOW AVAILABLE- Oracle MAF Mobile UX RDK: We’re excited to announce the availability of the Oracle Mobile Application Framework (MAF) Mobile UX Rapid Development Kit (RDK).  This latest RDK is for anyone who wants to innovate fast in the SaaS cloud and to design and build mobile apps with a great UX using Oracle MAF.

CREATIVE COLLABORATION: Check our new blog, the OAUX Blog, for two new posts on where we’ve been engaging and collaborating and just generally being creative:

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) : Social Media Channels

If you are interested in User Experience (UX), you can keep up with the latest news on these new channels from the Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) team.

Of course, you can still keep up to date with information from the Usable Apps website.

Happy UXing… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Google’s “Material design”

materialdesign_principles_metaphorAs a “born again UX/UI” enthusiast I was quite interested when some of my Google services started telling me about the new UI they were introducing. As part of the “do you want to see more” links they pushed me across to Google’s Material design pages.

I had a bit of mixed reaction to a lot of it. Some of the stuff was straight from the ministry of the bleedin’ obvious, while other stuff was more subtle. I really liked the section on motion, some of which reminded of messages the folks on Oracle’s UX team had been pushing.

A couple of things had to be explained to me by the young folks in the office as I genuinely couldn’t tell the difference, but when they were explained in the most numpty fashion possible, I was able to fake understanding enough to get them to leave me alone and go back to doing young-person stuff.

I’m interested enough to look at this stuff, but not interested enough to do anything about it at the moment, so don’t expect me to launch into a site redesign just yet… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Cloud UX Strategy Day : #OAUX

I spent yesterday at the Cloud User Experience (UX) Strategy Day at Oracle HQ. I’m not really the target audience for this event as I’m not a front-end developer and at the moment I know almost nothing about Oracle Cloud Apps, but I am gradually being drawn into this area by a number of external forces.

I can’t really speak about the content of the day because of NDA and because I’m a total newbie, so I will make a fool of myself if I try to speak like I know this stuff. 🙂

I’ve been a casual observer of the stuff the UX team do for a few years and each time I see something by them I understand a little more. It’s like an onion. You have to keep peeling back the layers to see the next layer down. I’m still stuck at the outer layers, but I’m starting to know enough to know I don’t know enough…

I think it’s a pretty interesting subject, regardless of the discipline you work in. It will definitely influence your perception of what you do. If you are interested in User Experience (UX) check out the resources on the Usable Apps site.

Hopefully I will get to come back next year and I will be able to check out the next layer of the onion. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Public Cloud User Experience Issues

For some time I’ve been openly critical of the user experience (UX) of Oracle Public Cloud. Just to be clear what I mean by this…

  • I am not talking about the quality of the services that are delivered, or the underlying technologies being used. I’m talking about the day-to-day usage of the Oracle Public Cloud (OPC) interface. The web pages you use to administer this stuff.
  • I’m not talking about the SaaS offerings, like Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications. I have no experience of them, so I am not in a position to comment on them.

With that understood, I have some big issues with the UI/UX of Oracle Public Cloud. I have been providing feedback (briefings, webinars, direct feedback and private forum posts) for some time, but while there are some improvements, the experience of administering your services through the OPC web interface is far behind that provided by Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure IMHO.

We recently had an ACED webinar and during the questions at the end I had a little rant about the user experience. Once that had ended, I wrote and email apologising to the presenter, but also listing a few of my gripes. I also reached out to the Oracle Applications User Experience team…

Yesterday I had a phone call with Jeremy Ashley about the situation and in the next couple of weeks I will hopefully be engaging with the UX team to discuss and demonstrate the issues I have.

Most of the problems I have are about wanting to follow a natural flow of tasks. Many aspects of the interface look like a developer has tried to expose the underlying tech, rather than asking how a user might want to interact with the service. The interface and the implementation do not have to match!

I was going to start a series of blog posts discussing the various UI/UX issues that annoy me, but I will probably hold back on that. Doing some constructive criticism directly to people that can make a difference is much better than me publicly throwing my toys out of the pram, but it’s not quite as fun. 🙂

Fingers crossed!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I’ve been getting some stick from the guys at work about my telephone voice at the start of the call with Jeremy. I allegedly sounded like a cross between Hyacinth Bucket and Kenneth Williams. 🙂

Microsoft Outlook : When Bad UX Attacks!

I guess there are lots of problems with the User eXperience (UX) of Microsoft Outlook, but the one that kills me is the popup menu in the folders pane.

I’m not sure how other people use this, but for me, the number one thing I do is “Delete All”, closely followed by “Mark All as Read”. I have a bunch or rules that “file” irrelevant crap, which I later scan through and typically delete en masse.

So what’s the problem?

The folder operations are higher up the menu, so I’m constantly doing “Delete Folder”, rather than “Delete All”, which drives me mad. Especially when I don’t notice and all my rules start failing.

Like I said, I don’t know how other people use this stuff, but I would hazard a guess that the clean-up operations are used more frequently than the actual folder maintenance operations. This is one situation when having the most frequently used sections of the menu being promoted to the top would be really handy.

Of course, I could just pay more attention… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…