Showing posts with label roi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label roi. Show all posts

Friday, February 11, 2011

Business Applications Usability & Recurring Benefits

In your business environment and the spread of IT landscape comprising of huge distributed business applications like ERPs, what are your primary goals when it comes to assessment of the entire system metrics?

Primary Goals



  • Reduce training time and increase user comprehension;

  • Increase productivity, efficiency, and data integrity;

  • Increase speed, ease of navigation, and ensure a comprehensive data footprint.


Depending on specific platforms and technologies in use, without compromising on their internal functionalities and rich features, what are the few generic and common customization approaches to achieve the above goals?

Few ways to achieve customizations in business applications



  • Change standard terminology to those your organization's pervasive business terms thus eliminating ambiguity and uncertainty;

  • Reduce manual data entry by automating redundancies;

  • Rearrange your tabs, buttons, workflow elements and fields to match those of your internal processes;

  • Hide unused workflow elements and fields and create validations for all of the fields necessary to achieve a complete set of mandatory data;

  • Consolidate multiple tabs, screens within your workflows and create a streamlined and easy to navigate environment;

  • Consolidate multiple workflows and shortcuts in a dashboard and one-click interface if feasible and ensure that users provide all necessary data and jump across relevant areas without expending extra effort.


A summary of recurring benefits



  • Increase in productivity creates direct full time employee benefits thereby enabling a redeployment of resources to other areas of business;

  • Increase in efficiency improves employee experience and reduces training and retraining burden from the company and management;

  • Speed, clarity and easy navigation creates enhanced customer satisfaction and leads to more happy and reference-able clients;

  • Automation and validation reduces the time required to navigate through systems and ensures a more comprehensive data set for management reporting;

  • Consolidation and streamlining creates a cleaner and more scalable environment that is more conducive to retention of existing workforce without the need for additional resource expenditure;

  • Survival of enhancements through upgrades ensures that your investment is preserved and additional resources are used for additional enhancements;

  • Ease and speed of deployment ensures that you can create a multitude of enhancements in a very short time with near immediate results.


Thoughts?

Monday, January 17, 2011

Usability Dimension: "Valuable"

VALUABLE.

The 7th and last feature in the series of Usability Dimensions. For earlier features, kindly follow the following links: useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, and credible.

Depending on the specific case, all previously discussed dimensions need to be balanced in varying degrees, and not treated as mutually exclusive. However, the aspect of "valuable" is commonsensical and must. On one hand, it should relate to and contribute towards the company's ROI. On the other hand, it should also equate itself to ROE (User's Return on Experience). The user-interface design of your site or product should in effect result into one or more of measurable and sustainable benefits like:

  • increase in sales

  • increase in operational efficiency

  • increase in productivity

  • decrease in operational/maintenance costs

  • re-use of existing components and infrastructure

  • increase in brand awareness/networking outreach


This makes your site/product valuable. Only "shared" value (between Business community and User community) is the key to long term sustainability. I'm struggling to list down the examples of "valuable" websites, primarily because the "value" can be really diverse based on specific businesses, specific user community etc. For example, Technical Developers may find technology forum sites really valuable, much different than a teenager finding value in gaming or music sites, and so on. I'll attempt to list down few generic valuable sites that most end-consumers today from any category, qualification, or industry would not live without. Yes, it's easy to guess a few at least...as they would definitely echo your own choice too.

Here goes:

I encourage you to share your views and few more additions to the list, as comments to this post.

In conclusion, our sites and products must deliver value to the customers and sponsors. For non-profits, the user experience must advance the mission; for profits, it must contribute to the bottom line and provide customer delight.

Watch this space for more example-oriented features (please expect some overlaps in discussion points) through another series of the Five-Es of Usability - another view of usability dimensions: Effective, Efficient, Engaging, Error Tolerant, Easy to Learn.