Thomas saw the light!

In my last post I made reference to Thomas’ reference to enterprise systems as akin to broccoli – not as much fun as ice cream, but way more nutritious. I want to comment a bit more about his post and the Redmonk Radio podcast he was on. Go read and listen, it’s good stuff.

Thomas, I enjoyed your posts and the podcast, even though it took me 3 days to get through it all! In the work you’re doing with the Design Services team you’ve experienced firsthand how empowering it is to take a user-centric perspective to solving business and application challenges. Folks new to the process usually come out revved up and excited. And you’ve discovered what fun we can have if we take that approach into as many situations as possible.

Thomas comments in the podcast how he imagines UI to be like fashion, and he’s on the right track. UI, like all graphic design, is subject to the tastes of time and place. I know many designers who have excellent usability sensibility but even with that in place it’s a single yet key component of the total experience. In the same way, it’s not about Web 2.o widgets or shiny logos. It’s about getting rid of some of the messy and annoying administrivia with elegant, unobtrusive interfaces that don’t call attention to themselves but blend into the process.

At our company we’re deep in the goal-setting process. As an aside – it’s interesting to be responsible for delivering the service as well as taking part in it. I have an exciting set of goals for this year. We’re to be change agents, sharing the secrets of user-centered design with our business relationship managers and the development teams’ business analysts. We’re to continue our work in enhancing the user experience past the user interface layer out to the training, learning and support materials, down into the service centers and voice response systems. We’re embedding our practice in the development lifecycle to ensure that it becomes part of the fabric. I didn’t expect it but this year it seems I’ll be a teacher.

The things that delight

Yesterday was my son’s 11th birthday. He got a few new games for his Nintendo DS, and when he went to check them out he yelled out for me to “check this out!”

In the setup of the DS you enter your birth date, and it very dutifully displayed a splash screen when he started it wishing him a Happy Birthday, replete with famous Nintendo game characters. Needless to say he was absolutely delighted by this simple bit of ‘personalization’.

Why don’t our applications do this? Why is it so hard to build anything beyond the most basic and broad personalizations into our systems? We know a lot about each user, and we can infer even more. Besides adding efficiency and eliminating unnecessary distractions, why can’t we delight our users? Until we have the same narrow-margin mindset that makes Nintendo and Amazon go our of their way to keep their users happy we will continue to be broccoli, as Thomas puts it.

Mobility revisited

In mid-2006 we launched our global “mobility” offering – not an expat program (which of course we have), but standardized guidelines for changing jobs inside the organization integrated with Taleo on the back end. It was a fairly simple bit of work intended to raise awareness around internal opportunities coupled with an attempt to improve on the Taleo search interface. We’re picking up again, and today I attended a kick-off with folks from North America, EMEA and Asia. Someone from LATAM is involved but couldn’t attend.

We have about 16-18 months worth of work on our high-level wish list just to start with, I’m excited about the more strategic thinking around how this fits into other offerings towards a set of career management tools – policy alignment, link and/or integrate with learning, development, talent, branding. I’ll report back on what gets priority.

Soup or Salad? How about an appetizer instead?

I started to reply to DoubleDubs’ post: Melting Pot or Salad Bowl part 2 but I got so verbose I figured I better put it down here. Go read his originals, then come back.

I have a dozen or more vendor products in the mix, each with their unique UIs and generally poor ability to integrate via any method, not the least being a services architecture. I love the food analogy, but I tend to characterize what I want as being like Amazon. It’s a sure bet that they use content management, media distribution, shopping cards, credit clearance, inventory, their famous recommendation engines, user profiles…you get the idea. Yet at the UI layer it’s a single, seamless product. It had better be, because if they can’t get me to that last click they don’t get revenue. We don’t share that imperative, but we should. Then I wouldn’t need to take 2 hours of training before I can use the darn thing. Granted, we are more familiar with the shopping domain than with the employee transfer domain.

So do we need specialized interfaces? They are a Good Thing in may cases. You wouldn’t want to use Photoshop or a Playstation with a mouse or keyboard. I support specialization and at the same time reject the idea that a specialized interface has to look unique.

We have almost 40 internally developed point solutions. A few of them are big-ticket global apps and many others are specialty items for a particular line of business’ unique needs. We just finished developing a set of interface and design standards for all of them. We developed a framework and then the UX team went through a ‘skinning’ exercise to ensure that we could apply the standards regardless of the interface we were dealing with.

This is not a melting pot. It’s more of a family resemblance. And it’s an important step towards aligning ourselves to the state when we stop being application-centric. Right now I have business managers, analysts and developers who live in their own silos. They know the rest of us are out there but it’s not their problem, they know their function and that’s what matters to them. By introducing the notion that they don’t get to design their UI independently, we begin to get them to look around and notice that we look alike. It’s an appetizer, meant to pique their hunger for the next course while delivering some real value for the consumer.

I want to get us completely away from application-centric thinking, but honestly nothing can support what I want to build yet. The vendors have to catch up to SOA and so do we with our internal apps. I know this is true because we are using services and SOAP for some of our integration functions. It’s still immature, and I fear that that our vendors worries disintermediation results in partial solutions for a while to come and a lot of custom work on our part. In the meantime, I hope we’re making it easier by going to standard interfaces where we can.

Begin at the beginning

We got so busy so fast that it feels quaint to look at what I wrote in May. I was brought into an initiative from an executive HR committee that was formed to align certain global policies and make them more visible to employees. We were presented with a multi-page wish list that was mostly new content and information but it included a new front end to one of our vendor apps. It needed to be available in multiple languages and had a complex rollout schedule based on country-by-country regulations and reviews. It had to be live in a bit less than 60 days, including global usability focus groups. My team and I found ourselves in the UK, Germany, Hungary, Singapore, Mexico, Brazil and a few US locations, but we hit our marks. That effort took up most of May, all of June and some of July.

Task two was to work up a new set of interface standards for all our HR applications – including vendor apps wherever possible. We started from the premise that the employee experience starts at the intranet home page. As it happens I spent many years running our corporate intranet and have remained actively involved as it’s being migrated to it’s next iteration. Since I had already provided the information architecture and graphical approach for that project, we started with those. After many iterations we came out with a framework that we’ve tested against dozens of different apps and intranet sites. I socialized the heck out of it and now it’s been adopted as the company’s new intranet standard. Based on our design work we’ve also gotten our internal branding standards modified to our designs. This past week we began meetings with the development and analyst teams to begin gettting the migrations from the old to new UIs into their project plans. It’ll take all of 2007, if not longer to get everything done.

My boss and I have been doing a lot of brainstorming around manager self-service environments. I’m advocating a new interface layer leveraging an undefined business workflow toolset and SOA. Mashups, essentially. Double Dubs has been talking about SOA again and as usual I agree with him. However, there are big gaps and lots of disparity when you look at whether application X allow you to pick up discrete funtionality to use in a mashup. Worse, I’m still not certain that I have the proper platform to build this new layer on. SOA is still in it’s infancy with most of the vendors we use and they only change slowly and carefully.

Even more challenging is internal resistance. Many of the teams who we’d be consuming services from argue that they already have a fully capable environment, which brings me to another item that’s been discussed a lot lately – that we need to apply a set of metrics that let us more objectively measure our sucesses and failures in delivering and promoting self-service across all our service delivery channels. We know what they are but any time you ‘impose’ new metrics on a team there’s a lot of convincing required.

But wait, it gets better. At the same time I’m beginning to plan an application upgrade to the Peoplesoft Portal. I’ll save that for later. Is this a fun life or what?

This time it's for fun

Packing up again, this time it’s a Caribbean cruise with the family. All I can say is: I’m so ready.

But before I go, a quick request. A project came up to build a quick and dirty knowledge base for expats and every time the model is seen someone wants to bolt on another function. We’ve decided to do the expat piece as a proof of concept and build a reference architecture model for a process tool in parallel.

There are a lot of choices for process modeling tools around here, ranging from homegrown to dedicated teams that claim to be centers of excellence. Anyone with practical experience in HR process modeling, I’d love to hear from you. I’ll be back on shore on the 27th.

Deck the halls

Mostly off topic…my life has been inundated with PowerPoint. Starting with a summary presentation of the strategy meetings I detailed last month, one by one they increased and soon I was juggling decks from all sides, including from my school-age children.

I’m reasonably adept at PowerPoint, and I believe that in the right hands it can do some very cool things. Musician David Byrne has done some interesting work using it as an artistic medium. However, in the case of most business applications, I tend to agree with Edward Tufte’s sardonic assessment of the cognitive limitations that template-driven PowerPoint imposes. One of the better examples, by Peter Norvig, is here.

The next presentation I had to deliver was at a benchmarking group. Mulling over my topic and this love/hate relationship I have with PowerPoint, I decided to try a presentation modelled after the “Lessig Method”, named for Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, whose presentation style of using slides with short phrases or even single words has gained some notice. More about that here.

Generally I don’t work from detailed speaking notes. I usually present on subjects that I’m close to and am relaxed speaking freely about. My slides are typically milestones of what I’ll cover verbally. In this case I created my deck by essentially figuring out how my rap would go by rehearsing it a few times and pulling out lots of key words and phrases per Lessig’s approach. I ended up with 50 slides for what would probably have been 10 or 12 if I’d used the typical title-bullet-transition approach.

Sad to say, it didn’t resolve my PowerPoint angst. My presentation was very well received, right up there with highly entertainment-oriented ones where I’ve pulled out all the multimedia effects. I was asked by a reviewer at my office if he could have a copy so he could steal it for his own presentations. Yet at the same time I can’t escape feeling that perhaps it was well received only because of it’s novelty, a break from the bullets. And the impression that I get from the presentation style, and others I’ve seen like it, is that of ‘MTV for meetings’ – lots of quick cuts, flashing screens and only tiny amounts to digest in one bite. Well, if that’s my worst burden, I’ll deal with it.

My daughter in middle school has been using PowerPoint for a few years, they teach it in school these days. For my son’s 10th birthday she made him a presentation instead of a card – with photos, clip art, animation, sound and timed transitions. And now my son is getting the same instructions she had a few years back and together we created a deck for his research project. And he demanded backgrounds, type effects and cool transitions too.

I used to be in graphic design. Maybe I still am.

Back Home

I’ve made it back to New York. Tokyo is a fascinating city, I enjoyed it very much. We stayed until Sunday morning, which gave us some time to sight see on Saturday and get a bit of the flavor of the city. On Friday we ran two intranet usability sessions which were very much on a par with all the others to date. I must say that I’ve experienced far less regional variation in the response to our prototype and types of issues raised than I anticipated. The anecdotal evidence points to people (at least those within my company) being more similar than different. While I treasure differences around the world it’s assuring to see that in some way the web has enabled us to provide people tools that can be used with a degree of consistency globally.

I was able to chat up one of our senior HR people and some of his team, although it was not a full a session as I’d hoped. But just being there and meeting them ensures that future telephone exchanges will be more productive. In mid December we’ll cover some sites in Latin America which will wrap up our ‘four corners’ tour. For my part I see that our HR self-service deployment has greater complexity than I’d realized. At one level we have enough flexibility in our systems to allow for local variation but there will be many challenges as we go along regardless. I wonder if it’s ever possible for an organization our size to move to truly global standards? I believe it would have to be more of a command-and-control environment, and I’m not aware of many multinationals that successfully operate in that manner. In any case there’s much to do and now I have a few more personal connections with which to do business.