Scott Lawrence
SPHERE OF INFLUENCE, INC. – software studios and services

Users interact with enterprise applications differently than they do with games.  They typically fill out a form, submit it, and wait for the application to process it and respond.  When a web browser is the interface, the "input-process- output" workflow may repeat across multiple web pages.  This may be appropriate for data entry applications, is it our best option for today's enterprise applications?  The rest of this post will explore that question.

Talking with a friend about this idea not long ago, he used required fields as an example of how games like World of Warcraft are different from enterprise applications.  In enterprise applications, if you don't have all the elements required to complete a form, you can't proceed any further.  This can be especially problematic in enterprise application with web interfaces (because of the stateless nature of the web), unless the application provides a mechanism for saving your progress.  Even if such a feature is implemented, it isn't terribly helpful if you can't save your progress without required data (a problem I actually experienced on an insurance quoting website this week). In quest games, sub tasks of a larger quest can be completed in any order.  So if you were missing a key needed to open a particular door, instead of being unable to move forward at all, you'd have the option to either try and find the key right away, or complete an entirely different task.  How might an enterprise application improve its usability given this comparison?

One option might be to change the order that form elements appear in so the required fields only appear at the end of the process requiring their submission.  Unfortunately, this could lead to un-related elements appearing together on a form or web page, which might confuse the user.  A second option would be to keep track of required fields with missing information, and display them at a confirmation step before the user submits.  Choosing this option enables the application to collect more information earlier, keeps the user moving forward through the process, and reduces to one the number of times the user has to leave the interface to find missing information.

Turning from games to search engines, the way people interact with Google or Yahoo search differs from their interaction with enterprise applications too.  Instead of the "input-process-output" paradigm explained earlier, the interaction looks multiple repetitions of "search-explore result", either with completely different search terms or refined search terms based on the results of previous searches.  Combined with the browser, and easily-grasped features like the back button (and history) and bookmarks, the entire world-wide web could be considered an addictive application.

Google's search engine is a great example of a simple interface as well.  The user experience people get from Google sets a very high quality bar for search functionality in corporate portals (discussed in part 2), but the closer we get to it, the more appealing such applications will be.

Successful, addictive websites are everywhere, so are failures. Often the difference is hard to see. Why are sites like Drudge Report so active? For example in August 2008 Drudge set a new record of 614 million page loads and 14 million uniques. Other news sites, like MSNBC, don’t get anywhere near that level of traffic. Why? Product design concepts like “Amplification through Simplification” are certainly at work, but it takes just the right amount of ‘amplification’ combined with exactly the right amount of ‘simplification’--a difficult balance to achieve.  Notable by their absence are any "Web 2.0" technologies and beautiful graphic design--The Drudge Report achieved this volume of usage without them.  Users of The Drudge Report seem to value simplicity and ease-of-use over the bells and whistles of many content sites.  The growing popularity of RSS feeds and readers for consuming information from the web is another indication of the value users place on simplicity.

In addition to "Amplification through Simplification", Drudge Report displays many design attributes listed in part 1 of the series. The news items change regularly. When it comes to controls, you can't get much simpler than an link. The site honors the convention of underlined text being clickable, so it's intuitive to use.

We've seen over the past few posts that games and successful websites have a number of design attributes that enterprise applications can benefit from.  Consider them (and other sources) for inspiration as you seek to make your enterprise applications more appealing to use.