Improving Usability for Enterprise Staff Systems (Using Siebel TBUI)

The Issue

The principles of good design and usability have been present in web design for some time but have been used haphazardly in the design of enterprise systems used in large organisations. A recent assignment with a client organisation to improve the usability of their customer management system shows the importance of "outside-in" as a core design principle.

Contextual enquiry and observation showed that the most primary tasks for users -‘searching and updating customer and relationship records' could take up to 11 min to complete and that a third of users actually failed to complete the task correctly. The result of this is widespread and includes low staff productivity, morale and customer information data accuracy issues.

You have to ask why this is the case with many staff systems? Many of these systems were design based on "activity workflows" rather than consideration of the customer and what staff need during the interaction to create a better experience. The design of these systems, some new  and some dating back 10 years or more, were aiming to emulate the workflow used by staff. However, the workflow is not always the same and being prescriptive caused unnecessary steps in the process resulting in inefficiency (refer the 11 minutes example above).By using the simple concept of designing outside-in, processes can be simplified and functions provided to staff to maximize their productivity during the interaction.

Our Approach

To improve this process we began with a review of the system and asked:

• What does the user want be able to do with this?
• What are the most common tasks that will be done here?
• What are the least common tasks?
• What is the normal sequence of events for the user (not the computer)?

We then involved users in the design of the system not to start from scratch but to design a task wizard (using Siebel's new Task-Based User Interface technology) that would improve the search capability and show only relevant information when it was needed to complete the task.  

Siebel's TBUI has been in the making for years. It has the ability to provide substantial improvements to the Siebel user interface - a complaint that has been around for many years! Often, Siebel screens have been designed with too much information, or too many fields for the average user resulting in a non-intuitive interface.

We looked to find what business processes required improvement and which were candidates for use of TBUI. Not all were! Some just needed sensible redesign of screens and simplification of processes. We then produced paper prototypes using sketching techniques which were later refined to deliver our final design.

Conclusion

The feedback from the users was that the new design is:

• More customer focused rather than being activity-centred
• Faster to use and easier to train
• Frees them up to interact with clients rather than navigating screens

This process has confirmed a number of things we have seen previously in designing desktops for users including:

• Start by understanding the user
• Structure information to reflect the interaction
• Good design principles are critical in staff desktops as they are in web design (things like form field validation, error messages and navigation)
• Ongoing reviews are important for keeping your desktop up to date on changes to process or policy
• Siebel TBUI has merit in solving these issues though is not a panacea.