As a prelude to the roadmap 2011-12 that will be published in the next few days, let me reveal one of the many exciting things we plan to do: A touch/mobile interface for Openbravo 3.



(Credit: US PTO/Apple)
Tablets and smart phones are soon to overtake the role as the preferred device to access the internet. Although enterprise software is typically used in an office environment, this is also changing.

The advantages are clear. A mobile enterprise can benefit from a higher workforce productivity - up to 45% [1], faster decision-making and increased employee satisfaction.

Openbravo 3 has a highly sophisticated architecture where the GUI is defined in metadata. This allows us to easily optimize the GUI for smaller screens and touch interfaces.

Simplification is critical in designing for touch/mobile. Too often mobile apps or sites try to mimic their desktop siblings without looking at the specific opportunities and constraints of mobile devices. We intend not to do the same.

At this point I´m trying to get a grip on which business tasks are essential for mobile. We aim to make all functionality of Openbravo 3 accessible through mobile devices but at the same time we need to make sure that the user experience of the key flows is superb. Let´s focus on what´s important first.

Here are some examples of tasks that could be candidates:

• A manager approving employee expenses while traveling
• A sales rep placing an order together with the customer
• A sales director checking the sales figures before a meeting with his team
• A CFO checking the financial health of the company in a chart in a widget on his mobile phone
• A shop owner using her tablet as both a POS and ERP
• A warehouse person picking orders using his tablet
• A sales rep being notified that a customer placed an order that cannot be delivered because it is out of stock

Now I´d like to know what would be the typical tasks for your business (or your customer) while away from the desk.

Throw your ideas at us in the comments, via Google+ or Facebook, thanks!

[1] bfrench:"Survey: Mobile Apps Increase Enterprise Performance and Productivity Advantages, Top Three Mobile App Strategies Gain Momentum". iPad CTO. Retrieved 8/11/2011.

We´re on the brink of an exciting moment in the ERP space with the publication of Openbravo 3 - Production in a few weeks time. It brings the most radical change in the product´s history.

While the development team is working day and night to make this happen, I would like to share a bit of background information on the design process, context and principles that we applied in this project.

Release Candidates rather than a Big Bang

Big changes carry big risks so at the start we chose to deliver Openbravo 3 in seven subsequent release candidates rather than one big-bang launch. Every release candidate was a working version that customers could try and in every subsequent version the number of bugs decreased and the number of features increased. Releasing this way does not only reduce risk but is also a great way to get early customer feedback, especially being Open Source.

The first release candidate gave birth to multiple tabs, then we added workspace widgets and finally a new master-detail paradigm using redesigned forms, editable grids and split views. With these pillars, our vision for a highly productive, usable and enjoyable ERP system was realized.

From now till the production release we will focus on testing and fixing bugs.

Design Imperatives

A redesign project of such scale and complexity needs to be confined within high level design imperatives. So we started out with stating what Openbravo 3 had to be:

• Holistic: The solution had to make sense as a whole, not just a set of independent features
• Relevant: The solution had to make sense to our users by making work more productive and more enjoyable
• Open: The solution had to be created using a transparent design process involving stakeholders at all times
• Supported: The solution had to be evangelized both in- and outside the company to get buy-in
• Realistic: Dreaming is easy but the solution had to be built eventually with limited resources
• Shipped: Because that is all that matters

Obeying these design imperatives does not guarantee success but it was clear from the outset that not obeying them would guarantee failure.

Big Design Up Front

Big Design Up Front (BDUF) means that a product´s design is completed and perfected before the actual development starts. Although this approach clashes with the agile development approach, I am a strong believer that for large and complex design projects, this is the only way to go. Apart from getting a higher quality design and better buy-in, BDUF also reduces the amount of changes further down into the development stage. For a UX designer to “change” a piece of functionality means 30 minutes sketching on paper or modifying a mockup in Photoshop. For a developer, once something is coded, changes can take up to days.

As stated above, our solution needed to be holistic, meaning that we did not want to fix a couple of hundred of bugs and plug in a dozen features hoping that this would result in a coherent and intelligent product. We needed to step back from the current product and situation and spend some time thinking about the ideal experience.

This was to become the User Experience Vision which was based on the six core capabilities that we discovered through talking to our business partners, customers and end users. The final solution had to have all of these capabilities, in order to be a success. Taking out one of them would mean breaking the holistic solution.

1. Multi tasking. Business processes are never linear and necessary information does not always sit in one place. We discovered that our users need to be able to work on multiple documents at a time.So we introduced tabs allowing multi-tasking, comparable to how users work with modern web browsers.
2. Key information delivered at your finger tips, rather than having to go out and find it. Creating reports is a tedious task. So we introduced widgets that pull essential data from the database, web pages or apps onto a workspace. We bundled a few in the product but it is easy to add or build your own.
3. Easy and direct searching & filtering. In the jungle of ever growing data volumes, search is more important than ever. So we looked at the essence of ERP data views, which are grids and applied column filters to them. They let you search on any attribute or combinations thereof, in real-time.
4. Comparing documents and viewing parent-child documents in a single view. This is the so-called Master-Detail view. Many ERPs ony let you look at either parent or child records but never together, forcing you to continuously switch back and forth while doing your work. So we decided to build a new type of component that combines parent and child data in any combination grid-grid, form-grid, grid-form or form-form. You can choose the screen layout by dragging the splitter bar and maximizing levels.
5. Editing in-grid. Editing data in a grid must be as easy as editing a spreadsheet. Full stop. So that´s what we build.
6. Fast and responsive user interactions, comparable to client applications. Although this cannot be marked purely as a capability, it is a quality attribute that is important enough to count as a requirement that must not be negotiated. It was clear that this was going to be quite a challenge because Openbravo 3 is fully web based. 

Here is what we defined as the user experience vision which later was decomposed into smaller components in this document.

Saying No

The holistic vision set the framework against which all decisions were to be measured. This makes it easy for the designer to judge ideas but at the same time very hard for others to see their ideas being rejected for no other reason than that their ideas don´t contribute to the vision.

If you want to design a great user experience, which in its essence means simplicity and productivity, you need to be on your guard at all times for the influx of nonsensical features. Stuff that comes from people that say “our competitor has it” or niche users that want specific features that only 0.01% of the users would ever need. Stuff that comes from users that already worked with ERP systems “before you were even born”. That kind of stuff is what you need to repel.

Every feature you add clutters the user experience, needs to be maintained, upgraded and documented and eventually will make both the product and the company less agile. When in doubt, you need to say no (and then buy your own drinks in the pub).

Working in an Aquarium

In the design process of Openbravo 3 we took full advantage of the open source character of the project. We have gone from early user studies, through ideation into numerous concepts and even more iterations, ultimately leading to prototypes and the final product. All this was done with close involvement of our community via concept sharing, surveys, voting and forum discussions.

Other than designing behind closed doors, we have continuously been sitting in an aquarium, not being afraid of proposing crazy or sometimes even naive solutions. While we were sketching screens or flows, you were watching over our shoulders while throwing comments or ideas at us and pulling the chain when we were about to stray.

That is why we are so confident that Openbravo 3 is a product that will make our end users smile, our customers productive and our business partners successful. We have listened and delivered. No focus on short term wins, gimmicks or marketing tricks, just a product that our users will love. They are the ones that will need to work with our software many hours a day and not designing for them first would have been a cardinal sin.

Agile and Lean UX

Agile development has been around for more than a decade now and has proven its value. It has shifted the focus from processes, documentation and project plans to collaboration, flexibility and working prototypes. When executed well, this results in lower risk and higher quality products.

It is common in agile development to work on features in short cycles that always result in a working piece of code. All three stages (design, build, test) of the development process are supposed to be executed in the same cycle that sometimes does not last longer than a few weeks. This is what I believe that agile development got wrong because UX design needs to start much earlier to be able to iterate, evaluate (with users and other stakeholders) and sculpt the designs. Working one or two cycles ahead of the development pack, UX can deliver fully tested, ready-to-build designs that do no have many surprises for the user nor the developer.

While delivering design work it is really important to produce detailed storyboards, mockups and flows instead of specifications documents. In fact, in this project I have hardly produced any documentation at all because the prototypes were the ongoing specs. Depending on the complexity of the design the designer needs to choose the appropriate level of fidelity for a prototype. For Openbravo 3, this ranged from pen & paper sketches to wireframes to Photoshop mockups to HTML clickable prototypes. The goal of these design deliverables is always to communicate the behavior of the application (feature, functionality) to the stakeholders and developers.

By making the prototype the ongoing spec it is always clear what is going to be built, whether it is going to work, whether the user understands it and whether the developer is able to build it. An example of a prototype that was produced to demonstrate the new master-detail interaction behavior is this clickable mockup. It was used for usability testing on end users but also by the development team to assess technical feasibility and to build a more sophisticated prototype that proved we could do it. You can read more about this approach in the excellent article Lean UX where Jeff Gothelf discusses why designers should get out of the deliverables business and back into the experience design business.

Letting UX work ahead of the development team together with using UX prototypes as the ongoing spec, is Agile UX at its best. We did this for Openbravo 3 and I can recommend this to every development team that works with UX practitioners.

Sticking to the Vision

Paolo Juvara already mentioned in his Emotional Review of the Openbravo 3 History that the final delivery of Openbravo 3 has stayed so remarkably close to the original vision and to be honest: this surprised me as well. When we first crafted the holistic vision for the user experience of the "future Openbravo", I could only hope that the final result would get "close enough" to the original design.

In most organizations, visions get blurred on the way and ideas bounce because of technical, organizational or even political disturbances. It would not be the first time that the final outcome of an assignment has not much to do with the initial customer´s request or idea. The worst of all cases is hilariously depicted in this classic. But we managed to defy all those evil forces and delivered what we wanted which says a lot about the innovative mindset of my Openbravo colleagues.

Shipping is all that matters

Good ideas are abundant, good products are not. We have always kept our feet on the ground and aligned our strategy towards shipping, because in the end that is all that matters.

On the way, we had fierce debates, disagreements and resistance but in the end we managed to find a solution that works well for most. You can't make everyone happy so we did not even bother trying. In fact you don't want everyone to be happy as this means your product is most likely so watered down that it can't be good. It's better to make 80% of the people very happy than 99% a little bit happy. Very happy users become fans and fans are loyal.

Big Thanks
I want to end this blog post with big thanks to Paolo Juvara (our CEO) and Ismael Ciordia (our CTO) who gave me the trust and freedom to design what is best for our users. The other big thanks goes to my amazing colleagues in the development team who made it all happen and all Openbravo community members who contributed so selflessly.

And now...

Get out there to try, download, implement, sell, share and enjoy Openbravo 3

In plain English this means: Hereby I invite you to participate in a series of User Feedback Opportunities (UFOs) on the Enhanced Sales Order Flow redesign project (ESO) we have started recently.

The objective of these sessions is to gather feedback on our design work. Using the input given, we can then modify, improve and tweak iteratively, leading eventually to a high quality, tested and low-risk design that will be used in Openbravo ERP 3.0.

The dates are as follows:
--------------------------------------------
Wednesday June 16th, 11.30-12.30h
(replacing Product Development meeting)

Jim, The Computer Seller
Download Scenario here
--------------------------------------------
Friday June 18nd, 11.30-12.30h

Liz, The Order Taker
Download Scenario here
--------------------------------------------
Wednesday June 23th, 11.30-12.30h

Dan, The Sales Director
Download Scenario here
--------------------------------------------
Friday June 25th, 11.30-12.30h

Amy, The Customer Carer
Download Scenario here
--------------------------------------------
It is necessary to download and review the materials prior to the sessions. For every session we will use one scenario (images + story) in a PDF document. Having this document open or printed is recommended to make it easier to refer to the images.

The sessions will be held through IRC** on irc://freenode/openbravo and the sessions will be open to all. Feel free to invite business partners, colleagues or end users with an interest in sales orders.

Hopefully I will "see" you online on one (or all!) of these dates!

Rob Goris, User Experience Architect - Openbravo

**For those of you who are not familiar with IRC chatting:

The easiest way is to use the webchat from irc.freenode.net, and you don't need to install anything.

* Go to: http://webchat.freenode.net/
* Pick a Nickname
* Channels: #openbravo

You can also install Chatzilla as an extension for Firefox:
You can install Chatzilla via:
* Tools - Add-ons - Tab Get Add-ons - Enter Chatzilla in search box
* Once installed: Tools - Chatzilla
* In Chatzilla, enter:
/attach irc.freenode.net
/join #openbravo

We are redesigning the Sales Order flow. This will be done from scratch, starting with customer stories, user research and process modeling. Then we´ll produce mockups that will be shared with you for feedback. The redesign will use 3.0 GUI design patterns and technology.

I´d like to ask you to share ideas, requirements, suggestions and pains here.

In site or application design, it is recommended to use best practices, rules-of-thumb and proven principles. User experience specialists validate most of their ideas and designs using those. In case they can't find any, they mostly resort to usability testing, trying to prove that something works or not.

Over the years, some of the rules-of-thumb have seeped through to the broader audience and are now widely used and abused. Some classic examples are: "Flash is Bad", "Frames Suck", "People don’t scroll!” and the most obstinate of them all must be "I should be able to find everything on a site in just three-clicks!".

The first two claims at least can be defended with reasoning and by the simple fact that Jakob Nielsen´s words are not to be disputed. The claims that user don´t scroll and that every page must be reached within three clicks are myths. There is no scientific proof or sound reasoning behind them.

In the case of scrolling, some 15 years ago many first time web users had to get used to content being spread out over a larger vertical area that needed scrolling to be viewed. Now, in 2010, it is not hard to assume that people learned how to use a mouse. Obviously, for advertising, being above the fold makes sense as more people will see your ad when landing on the page (where else are they going to look?). In the context of user tasks, users are willing to scroll, although they say they don't. Even Jakob Nielsen succumbed in 1997 and wrote that scrolling is now allowed.

My favorite myth is the Three-Click-Rule. In countless discussions with clients, management and developers I have heard this "argument" being used. I confess that I even shamelessly used it against others when it served me well. I have always kept my mouth shut when The Myth was used against me when designing e-commerce sites because it always made sort of sense to me to get that 12-piece knife set in gift wrapping as soon as possible in the basket and checked out before the customer changes her mind. And even in this case research has shown that The Myth does not hold true. User Interface Engineering (UIE) conducted an analysis showing that there wasn't any more likelihood of a user quitting their purchase process after three clicks than after 12 clicks. In the same analysis we can find that user satisfaction does not suffer with more clicks either: Fewer clicks do not make more satisfied users.

So, user frustration and success rates in task completion do not depend on the number of clicks. Nor do they rely on not having to scroll. What really matters is that users can find what they are looking for, which depends on many factors such as flow, layout, interaction and visual design. If users find what they are looking for in a logical (and therefore effortlessly reproducible & memorizable) manner, both success rates in task-completion and user satisfaction will be higher.

Most - if not all - of the research on these topics was conducted on web sites rather than applications but I suspect little difference in its applicability. In the case of business applications, such as ERP software, we need to be a little bit more careful because of the factor productivity. Productivity is output per unit which in most cases can be captured as work per time unit. This is where speed comes in. In our case, the speed of operation of the user is very important. It depends on the response time of the system and the user interface. The first is a purely technical matter; the second depends on the GUI design. I believe that the number of clicks and the amount of scrolling has little impact on the user productivity as long as the user has easy access to all information that is needed for the task at hand and all steps in the task flow are logical, predictable and reversible. Also: providing defaults, offering validation, saving preferences and supporting different modes of seeking information boosts user´s productivity.

If we look at an example of creating a sales order: Most of the time spent executing this task is spent on finding documents and entering and validating field values, either for headers or lines and in grids or forms. The time spent on clicking and scrolling is negligible compared to that. Making sure the user finds the right documents, processes, forms and fields and making sure that she performs the process steps in the right order without making mistakes is much more important.

Another great productivity enhancer is using keyboard shortcuts. Here the same applies: the amount of key presses is not very important, the underlying logic is.

There is nothing negative to be said against trying to minimize the amount of mouse clicking or scrolling, it even helps designers rethink their solutions and simplify process steps. They just should not be used as a rule or best practice. Let´s put these click and scroll myths to bed and start focusing on good design.

Photo courtesy of Thad Zajdowicz

In the last weeks mockups for the new GUI for OB ERP were tested on 12 users. Let me share the findings with you.

What was tested: three clickable mockups

Test methodology: participants were asked to execute a number of tasks, as described in the scenarios. They were asked to think out loud while doing so. All mouse movements were recorded, as well as the audio (participant talking). A web cam was used to record the user´s facial expression. The facilitator observed the participant, took notes and asked questions in case of hesitation, mistakes and other deviations from the pre-determined scenario path. Other than with the contextual inquiries (user observations) that were conducted in December 2008, I have decided not to post-process(annotations, etc.) the videos as the findings were extremely consistent across all sessions. The sessions were split in parts: 4 tests were done at first and findings were immediately processed into a modified design (biggest change was in the ribbon toolbar). The remaining 8 tests were done using both the initial design and the modified designs.

Findings: The most important findings are:

* Users have difficulty navigating the different master detail views from parents to childs, from grids to forms and back. There is definitely a learning curve but cognitive load seems to be high. I think part of it has to do with visual design but I´m concerned that this can only fix parts of the problem.

* Users have troubles finding menu items (buttons) in the ribbon toolbar. I noticed that the labels I initially used (such as "record") were not ideal, and changing them to more common labels (such as "edit") significantly improved the user´s performance. Still, it took most users a while to get used to the concept of "buttons hidden on tabs". Some users even thought the the form or grid below the toolbar was part of the tab. Here visual design and labeling play an important role but I have the feeling we should simplify, dumb it down. Plonking all buttons (icons) in one bar is perhaps the way to go. Users don´t seem to notice a difference between generic buttons and object specific process buttons but I still want to keep this clean separation, as in the earlier concepts.

* Forms work great. Users love the layout, the nifty sections and the color coding on field and section level for required fields.

* It was not always clear when records are saved and when not. Users did not seem to worry about it at first but seem to wonder what saving mechanisms are applied and demand clear feedback on the status. Auto saving is not always good: an implicit save action is requested for forms to avoid unfinished forms to be saved or even processed.

* Users double click rows in grids

* Users get confused about which tab contains what because of missing (id) labels on the tabs

* Three users had concrete examples of use cases where flicking through the headers while observing a related lines grid update is needed.

The detailed findings can be found here.

Now the next step is going back to the drawing board and solve the issues pointed out by our users. After that, another round of usability test might be necessary. As always, you are welcome to participate in all stages of the design process by posting on the UX Lab Forum.

The design concepts for OB ERP´s new user interface are getting more mature by the day and we continue using feedback at any stage, whether it be through the forums, peer reviews or usability tests. This time I have built a clickable prototype that shows a number of tasks around expense reports. It intends to verify how well our master-detail concept (Kompressor) works in real-life scenarios.

Download the zip file, unpack and run Expense Reports Scenario.htm. I will use this for a couple of usability tests with end users but I am also really interested in your thoughts while running it.

Normally I ask users to speak out loud while performing a task but that won´t work remotely (and your colleagues/wife/husband/house mates will look funny at you) so better write down your thoughts when running the scenario and post them here. If you are a colleague of mine and want to do the usability test, just let me know and we will do the test together in the office.

Remember that we are testing our software, not you, so don´t feel stupid when you did not click the right spot at first. It just means that the design is not right yet. The user is always right!

Running the scenario more than once can be interesting too, to see if there is a learning curve.

In the proposed concepts for a new GUI we showed a keyword suggestions feature, similar to what many other applications and sites use nowadays. You type the first couple of characters and a little flyout menu starts suggesting keywords.

Until now I assumed that these keywords suggestions should be based on a mix of popularity, recency and bookmarks. I even asked you if you liked those. This is what you said:

Query suggestions based on bookmarks
Very unimportant 0.00%
Unimportant 12.50%
Neutral 37.50%
Important 37.50%
Very important 12.50%

Query suggestions based on recent searches
Very unimportant 0.00%
Unimportant 4.35%
Neutral 34.78%
Important 52.17%
Very important 8.70%

Query suggestions based on frequency / popularity
Very unimportant 0.00%
Unimportant 8.70%
Neutral 30.43%
Important 52.17%
Very important 8.70%

[Full survey result details here...]

Compared to your appreciation for other features, you weren´t that excited about it apparently. Now maybe I know why. During the World Conference Last weekend a business partner showed us a customized screen using a sort of search suggestion based on live search. So while typing it actually searches in real time. Pretty impressive. I thought this would be too slow. Perhaps with 1 million records it would be. But look at this demo of a dhtmlx-grid (Select Loading from big Datasets > 50,000 records in grid from the tree menu on the left and tick the Enable Autosearch checkbox)...and start typing away. This rocks!

Having seen this, I can´t suppress my enthusiasm for live search suggestions but we need to make sure this is what you want. Compared to search QUERY suggestions. The latter is used in consumer applications, such as iTunes or Google Suggest. Music stores use them all the time, as what the masses want, is probably what you want (typing "b" in iTunes will inevitably show Britney Spears and Beyoncé, whether you like them or not).

So what will it be, dear user? Query suggestions or Live Search? Share your thoughts on the UX Lab. Tightly related is the discussion about Endless Scrolling versus Pagination. Give us your 2 cents here as well please.

Cheers, Rob

Less than two months ago we presented design concepts for a new user interface for Openbravo ERP and asked you to give feedback by filling out the surveys or by discussing the design work on the User Experience Lab forum. And so you did! No less than 127 surveys were completed and many users participated in lively discussions on the forum.

The forum discussions continue and I'm getting more and more excited to see what beautiful things are happening there. With your help I was able to lift the design concepts to the next level. What about the new Virtual Child idea: a more elegant solution for Linked Items, while offering a new home for meta data, notes and attachments? You guys loved the Column Search for the grids, but couldn't care less about First-Letter-Search. Good to know. About the proposed Advanced Search: You liked its power, but many users pointed out that it just takes up too much space. So, after some discussion on the forum, here's a more simplified version. We also worked a bit more on the Task Paths idea and introduced the Label Context Bubble. Now let's hear your feedback so we can sculpt it even further.

Back to the survey results. If you are into stats and charts: check the results for Overall, Master Detail, Search and MyWorkspace . Cutting a long story short: You liked our concepts very much. Over 96% of you think the new stuff is "better" or "much better" than the current Openbravo ERP GUI. The other 4% voted “neutral” and no negative votes were given.

Really encouraging were the comments you gave, spread out across all four surveys. Lots of "Bravos" and "We want it!" and most of them are about the concept as a "holistic solution". This is especially helpful as we intended to design a complete new GUI framework that needs to serve as the basis for future functionality. All the different functional areas need to work together as a whole. You gave us the impression that we are heading in the right direction here.

The concepts shown to you were all about the GUI of our product but obviously there are many more features that deserve their place on the road map. For the GUI related features we now have a good idea of what is important and what not. For the bigger list of features, please visit the Uservoice Openbravo page where you can vote for features.

Now the next step is to use all the feedback that you have given – or will give soon – in the next round of design iterations. We will keep on doing this till the moment we are going to build it. The UX Lab is the place to go. I will post new design work as we go and you can throw stones or flowers at it. At the moment I'm publishing all the latest design mockups in a Picasa web album. These images are really snapshots in time of ongoing design work so the latest greatest are the last ones in the sequence.

What we're doing here is called Collaborative Design. I will blog about this phenomenon soon into more detail.

Rob