UX - An Often Overlooked Key to Project Success

By Mark Sullivan (@msulliv)

How do you define project success? Is it delivering a project on time and on budget? Is it delivering business results? Increasingly, IT departments are expected to do more than deliver the project to completion. With public cloud solutions, a lot of the technical complexity of IT projects has been eliminated and the focus has shifted to delivering business outcomes. So the question for IT projects teams now is how to successfully deliver business outcomes.

We find time and again that the key to achieving business outcomes is creating solutions that are broadly adopted and used. Adoption happens through a combination of strong organizational sponsorship and bottoms-up usage and grassroots growth. Pure top-down approaches only go so far and start to break down after a while. The key to broad and sustained adoption is to create functional and engaging solutions that help people do their jobs better. That’s why user experience (UX) is such a critical component of a successful project.

What is User Experience?
In the B2C context, experience design is a growing practice broadly applied to many situations. Apple stores are great examples of brand experience design and customer experience design.

In the IT context, the term “user experience” describes how well technology supports an end-user’s goals - goals that usually center around accomplishing a business process with support from a business application.

A common misconception is that UX is mostly focused on creating visually appealing applications. While visual appeal is important, good looks alone are not enough to ensure a compelling user experience. UX can cover the range of interactions with applications - from user interface design to training and change management. So a good UX comes from incorporating user centered design, interaction design, information architecture, usability, and graphic design to create an engaging, purposeful experience.

UX for Cloud Applications – Is it Necessary?
User experience is not a new concern for cloud vendors such as Salesforce.com. They have already expended considerable effort on the user experience of their applications, performing rigorous usability testing, providing extensive training materials, and making support available through multiple channels.

But Salesforce.com and other SaaS vendors cannot optimize their application for your users, in your industry, in your business context. That “last mile” of user experience is up to you and your team to optimize.

Fortunately, many of the leading SaaS tools such as Salesforce.com are deep enough that you have several options for improving the out-of-the-box UX, from simple configuration through extensive customization.

UX Framework for Cloud Applications
We usually think about three levels of effort in optimizing the user experience for cloud applications like Salesforce.com.

Although we’ve diagrammed these levels as a hierarchy, it is possible (and sometimes desirable) to support multiple levels simultaneously, or to skip levels, from level 1 to 3, for example.

Selecting a Target UX Level
Clearly UX design can add cost to a project above merely delivering the baseline functionality. How can you determine when and how much to invest in optimizing the UX so that the value in user adoption and usability outweighs the incremental cost?

Generally, you should take a cost/benefit approach to the question, factoring in considerations such as how many users are affected, how critical they are to achieving the organization’s goals, how frequently they perform an activity, how often the functional requirements change, and so forth. Then, for each group of users, such as in-house sales reps, you can decide which UX option best balances adoption and cost: Good, Better, or Best.

Getting Started
If you’re just getting started with a cloud project, this is the ideal time to think about how your new solution is going to make your users’ jobs easier.

The key steps are:

1. Involve your UX team early in the initial design process make sure you have UX specialists early on in your project to start off on the right foot
2. Define who your users are sounds obvious but many projects have failed because solutions were designed for project sponsors and not for the actual user
3. Understand what your users are trying to do
4. Figure out how much you want to optimize the user experience configure, customize or contextualize for each segment of users
5. Involve end users in your development process
6. Iterate, measure and refine

If you already have a cloud application rolled out, the steps are similar but you should start by picking a segment of the user population and a finite part of your application to optimize. Then you can apply the same steps and expand your design scope as you see results.

If you need help along the way, tweet us @appirio #ux!

Mark Sullivan is a Sr. Consultant at Appirio. He is a founding member of the User Experience practice at Appirio and has a background in information architecture, usability, user adoption and application development at a variety of high-tech enterprises.

Happy first birthday to our crowd in the cloud

By Narinder Singh

A first birthday is a milestone - it’s a time to celebrate and reflect on the year past, all while knowing that there is a lot to be accomplished in the years ahead. In older times and developing countries the first birthday is celebrated heavily simply because it was a key inflection point in mortality rates and meant the feasibility of life had been confirmed - it was finally time to dream about the future.

It’s been exactly one year since we launched CloudSpokes - the crowdsourcing community that matches companies who need cloud development work with a worldwide community of specialist developers - and what a year it has been.

Last year, we were full of anticipation and nerves - we knew as well as anyone that there is a need for an alternate approach to development for the enterprise cloud development market, but the model had yet to be proven. As a company, Appirio celebrates cloud pioneers, and we pride ourselves on being one, but this was definitely pushing the envelope.

After a year of being live, we’re thrilled at what CloudSpokes has achieved. The community has gone from zero to 32,000+ global developers, produced more than 150 applications and projects and paid out more than U.S. $300,000. Despite knowing how innovative crowdsourcing can be (we had incorporated crowdsourcing into our own work before last year) we were stunned to see what the community began producing in a short amount of time and the amount of interest from other companies to get involved.

During the past year, CloudSpokes turned out some phenomenal applications in a short amount of time. Among our favorites are:

• Dreamforce party app: Helpes conference attendees keep track of social events and organize their calendar.
• Commute calculator: Helps companies determine the best location for new offices.
• Automated home security system: An alarm system that texts the home owner when the system detects an intruder.

We’ve also had the opportunity to meet a ton of cool people. CloudSpokes hosted U.S.-based hackathons for Dreamforce, Docusign E-Sign Hackathon, Angelhack and the Box.net mobile challenge. The CloudSpokes team was excited to see some of our own community members at a few of these events and hear their personal stories of how they’ve used contest winnings. We’re always happy to hear that we’re liked by our developers.

Coming off of a banner year for the community is humbling and exciting at the same time. We’re over the moon with what the community has achieved, but it’s just getting started -more contests, more ways to win money faster, more technologies, more innovation and more surprises! Thank you to everyone that’s been involved with the community’s success this year - here’s to many more birthdays.

Don’t Bring Your Junk Drawer to the Cloud

By Nick Hamm (@hammnick) and Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75)

A question we often hear from enterprises that are considering cloud applications or platforms like Salesforce, Google Apps, or Workday is, “Have you ever migrated from System X?” This is a natural question, and we understand why people ask it.

But if you think about migrating away from a legacy application like moving out of an old house, this would be like only asking your moving company, “Have you ever moved anyone out of a brownstone with a basement?” You may have asked about logistics but you probably spent a lot more time checking references, doing background checks, and ensuring that the company was adequately experienced in moving and had maintained a good reputation.

It is all too common to look at migration from a legacy application to the cloud as pure technical gymnastics. We’ve helped hundreds of enterprises migrate from every legacy platform imaginable including Siebel, SAP, Oracle, Outlook, Lotus Notes and even Rolodexes! What we’ve learned is that migrating to a cloud application is about a lot more than migrating your application logic “as is” from your servers to someone else’s. Cloud applications and platforms are much more flexible and easier to work with than traditional applications and bring enterprises new possibilities that were simply unavailable with traditional systems. With traditional applications, you had to spend so much time thinking about the infrastructure and the data that the things most important to user adoption (ease of use, user experience) were an afterthought.

With cloud applications and platforms, since a lot of the headaches of the past are gone, you can focus on thinking about your application from the perspective of those who are actually going to use it. Adoption, usage and business impact are what ultimately determine the success of your application. As you migrate to the cloud, you have the opportunity to focus on the things that improve your business rather than replicating every feature and data field from a legacy application that is going by the wayside. But how?

1. Define the Goals of Your Migration
It’s critical to start by defining the goals you want to achieve with your new application. Again, there may be a tendency to think of goals in very limited terms, e.g., IT operating expense, capital savings or hitting a specific deadline. But what we mean here is defining the business goals of your migration. What does your company hope to achieve by implementing a new application? What business goals and metrics do you want to impact? Often, enterprises embark on IT projects with a pure focus on technical and financial goals without defining business impact goals. This is a missed opportunity. A cloud migration is an ideal opportunity to engage with business stakeholders and determine how your project could address broader business priorities.

2. Understand the Business Process and Users Impacted by Your Application
Implementing a new app or platform is the perfect opportunity to revisit your business processes and enhance those that are working well and rethink or eliminate those that are not. Interview project sponsors, management, and end-users to gather many perspectives on what each group values as its priorities. Unlike a traditional process re-engineering effort, the idea is to quickly gather input on priorities and what’s working/not working, followed by prototyping the new process. The rapid prototyping capabilities available by adopting cloud platforms is one of the hidden benefits that you won’t find on any data sheet.  Take full advantage of this capability and it will lead to a pragmatic and actionable blueprint of the new process and how it could work in your new application.

3. Iteratively Build Your New Business Process in the Cloud
Once the business process blueprint has been defined, the team should turn their focus on how they can make those processes as automated and easy to follow as possible. After all, a great business process on paper is useless if it is complicated for the user to follow. In this part of the project it is important to prototype, iterate, user test, and repeat.  No matter how smart you are, your end users will always be smarter when it comes to how they want to work, and it will be invaluable to get their buy-in before expecting widespread adoption. Bottoms-up adoption can be more valuable than top-down (mandated) adoption, and this also promotes an open channel for ongoing feedback which will be critical for your application’s roadmap and continued relevance.

4. Transform and Migrate Your Legacy Data
So you noticed that we haven’t talked about your legacy application in a while. Well, that’s the point.  We don’t want that legacy baggage cluttering up your shiny new application. But we do need the data, so this is where we have to go back, extract the data, and start mapping and transforming it to your new model.  We didn’t let the old model dictate the new model, and that is critical. This move is your opportunity to clean out and reorganize all of those junk drawers and boxes in the back of the closet.  It’s easier to think, “I’ll just throw all of this stuff in a box and reorganize everything once it’s at the new house”, but most of us know how that story ends - with the same boxes of clutter in the back of a different closet at the new house. It’s more work, and sometimes more complex, to transform a legacy data model and data into a completely new system, but you’ll feel better about not having any old skeletons in your new closets, we promise.

Conclusion: Build for the future, not the past
The overarching message here is that no matter which legacy application you want to retire on your road to the cloud, the process you follow should be the same. Our experience over hundreds of implementations of cloud applications like Salesforce, Google Apps, or Workday has shown that today’s migrations don’t carry the same technical concerns that you had to worry about with old on-premise apps, allowing you to focus on the user and process instead of the technology. So don’t let your old technology weigh you down - build for where you want to go tomorrow, not for where you were yesterday.

Nick Hamm is a Sr. Solutions Architect at Appirio and Salesforce MVP.  He has helped over 200 companies across a wide variety of industries transform the way they do business by implementing cloud solutions. nhamm@appirio.com, @hammnick

From the Earth to the Clouds to the Moon

By Rob Cheng

Noted academic and writer Vivek Wadhwa has never shied away from controversy. He’s taken on hot-button topics of immigration and discrimination in the tech industry, and once called on entrepreneurs to rescue California. Last week, Wadhwa again challenged conventional wisdom by looking past the late-night punchlines about Newt Gingrich’s Moon Base and examining the core of his proposal, which is the role of competition in innovation.

Wadhwa writes in the Washington Post that such competitions are already making space flight more efficient, citing the 26 teams competing for a $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize reward, which is “causing entrepreneurs to develop creative new ways to attain spaceflight at a fraction of the normal cost.” He also points out that the long-standing $25,000 Orteig Prize helped spur innovations in aviation that enabled Charles Lindbergh to fly non-stop from New York to Paris in 1927.

A 2011 Harvard Business School study found that innovation competitions “fuel research and development that typically exceeds the value of the prize itself,” a finding that we have reproduced with our CloudSpokes community. Here are just a few examples of the creative solutions that even modest contest prizes have generated for our partners and clients:

• A $2,000 prize resulted in this geolocation-based account checkin iPad app to help sales reps in the field keep track of customer visits
• A $1,500 prize led to an employee commute calculator to help companies determine the best (and more environmentally friendly) location for new offices
• A $750 prize resulted in this Chatter social influence app to help social enterprises track and reward employee collaboration
• A $700 prize allowed users to “jailbreak” their Chatter user profile page to display custom content
• A $500 prize led to the creation of an automated home security system, complete with motion detection, video capture, and SMS alerts

While these contests are cost effective (clients have estimated they would spend at least 2-3 times as much even using offshore resources), cost is not the biggest benefit. Submissions come from members who are enthusiastic about the technologies involved and who are competing with their peers for prizes and recognition, and this intrinsic motivation brings out the best in developers. In some cases, such as the “Chatter Jailbreak” app mentioned above, the community has come up with solutions that we would have never known were possible otherwise.

Just like the Orteig Prize helped draw people and resources into the burgeoning aviation industry, CloudSpokes has already attracted 30,000+ developers to help build the next generation of cloud computing solutions. Think of them as a multi-tenant pool of shared development resources, with top expertise in every technology, programming language, and platform, that you can tap into on-demand.  And while there’s an obvious need for small businesses to complement limited in-house resources, the proliferation of cloud platforms means it’s no longer feasible for even large enterprises to internally staff for all needed skills, particularly when the demand for a particular technology or APIs is elastic (for example, Ruby-based social marketing apps that run on Heroku twice a year to support big seasonal retail campaigns).

In his Washington Post piece, Wadhwa advocates that NASA earmark 10% of its budget for innovation prizes. If 10% of NASA’s budget can spur breakthroughs in space travel and colonization, imagine the kind of innovation that a few percent of your organization’s IT budget could generate for your business!

Rob Cheng is Head of CloudSpokes Strategy at Appirio.  His background includes product management, product marketing, and developer evangelism roles at Salesforce.com, CollabNet, Borland, Oracle and the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I). @robcheng

The Growing Importance of User Experience in the Enterprise

By Kevin Dodson

There has been a paradigm shift happening in enterprises across all industries. The traditional “bottoms up” approach that enterprise IT has taken in implementing new technology solutions is on its way out. Until recently, the decisions of an IT department became what was available to employees, and it was likely the best available in the marketplace. Many of us fondly remember driving home to show our kids the cool new Blackberry we received from work. Well, those days are gone.

Now, the best technology is most likely at home and your kids are showing you how to use it.  You are now driving to work and telling your IT staff that you want to use your new iPad, iPhone or Android device. This “top down” approach to implementing new technology solutions in the enterprise is often referenced as the consumerization of the enterprise.

At the core of this consumerization of the enterprise revolution is user experience - you’re asking to use your iPad at work because it’s easy to use. The only reason you use the systems at work is because your job depends on it. If you weren’t forced to execute expense reports with scanners, scissors and tape, and instead could execute it faster with an iPhone app, you would likely spend a little more time doing your job. And you might even enter information into your CRM system more frequently if you could do it from your iPad.

A rich user experience is no longer an option when it comes to implementing any new technology solution within your enterprise and here are the reasons why....

1. Increase User Satisfaction - How many times have you heard, “our sales team, managers [insert group here] is not using a new system because it’s not easy to use,” or “the users hate using the application because it’s hard to do anything with it”? The more time you spend at the beginning of a project making sure there is a rich user experience, the more user satisfaction will increase.

2. Increase User Adoption - I come from the consumer market, building desktop and mobile applications for anyone who would buy it. Our highest levels of adoption were realized when people opted-in to use our solution. This is also true for the enterprise - people will use an application more often if they like the experience, regardless of how much pressure their employer puts on them to use it. Focusing on a consumer-like user experience, even for enterprise applications, can dramatically increase user adoption.

3. Lower Training Costs - If someone finds an application valuable and easy to use, they will likely make use of it often. It’s safe to bet that many people use their personal tablet or phone more often that their company’s CRM system (if the two aren’t interchangeable).  At Appirio, we’ve found that companies with successful implementations spend roughly 25% of their implementation costs on delivering user adoption (training, communications, change management). Larger implementations can spend spend roughly 30-35 percent on user adoption. Spending time at the beginning of a project on the user experience can lower these costs.  No one trained you to use Google, Craigslist or CNN.com. Think about it.

4. Increase in Productivity - Do not let technology get in the way of the user. A salesperson, physician, investment advisor, or whatever the role, does not want technology to slow them down. Making applications unique to the user’s job will increase productivity as well as their effectiveness.

5. Decrease in Support Cost - Prior to coming to Appirio, I worked on a project within the healthcare industry that boasted significantly lower support costs due to a user-focused solution. We selected iOS as the core operating system and built role-based applications within salesforce.com for the organization. As a result, the savings from the lower support costs more than paid for the entire new adoption of iOS and user-focused application.

The Consumerization of the Enterprise is happening and it brings great value to an organization. Focus on your user first and you will have more successful project launches in your future. What other benefits have you seen from a keener focus on the user experience when it comes to enterprise apps? Looking forward to your responses below.

Kevin Dodson helps lead the mobile practice at Appirio. He enjoys evaluating and managing new initiatives and brings extensive UI experience in the health care and high tech industries. kdodson@appirio.com