Michael Arent

Designing International Enterprise Software

This paper provides a framework to understand the various aspects of creating international enterprise software. These aspects could be used to evaluate and prioritize a software products investment in internationalization. The intended audiences for this paper are user experience designers, product managers and other members of the software development product team, interested in creating world ready enterprise software.

Sig: branding the changing enterprise - impact of mergers & acquisitions on user experience organizations

Mergers and acquisitions are becoming increasingly common in the enterprise software world. For example, SAP acquired Business Objects, Oracle acquired PeopleSoft and CA acquired Cassatt in recent times. While this is a business expansion strategy for the acquiring company, it presents a challenge for UX professionals in both the acquiring and acquired companies, who are responsible for branding the look and feel of the newly combined business entity. This SIG examines the design, technical and cultural challenges facing a UX practitioner from the acquiring as well as acquired companys perspectives. We will explore possible best practice solutions that can help other UX professionals facing similar challenges.

Getting Started: Your First Excel Prototype

This chapter provides a set of examples of Excel prototypes and outlines the procedure for creating an excel prototype. Everyone needs a quick and easy way to create prototypes. The prototyping tool should make credible-looking prototypes in variable degrees of fidelity. The tool should allow varying degrees of interactivity appropriate to the prototyping goals, but should not require extensive coding. The ideal tool would also leverage skills that one already has so that one does not need to learn anything new. Prototypes made through the steps highlighted in this chapter look as though they were made with a graphics tool, not a spreadsheet application. These prototypes were made possible by users learning to think of Excel as a graphics-based design tool rather than an application for spreadsheet calculations. There are many spreadsheet applications now available in the marketplace. Aside from the dominant application, Microsoft Excel, other similar spreadsheet applications are now available for prototyping: Apples Numbers, Open Offices Spreadsheet, and Googles Trixely. All these programs can do much the same thing in varying degrees; the user only needs to learn the different command structures and functions. It is important to note the fact that Excel was only chosen due to its current pervasiveness.

Chapter 3 – Basics: The Excel Prototyping Canvas

This chapter illustrates how to create a prototyping canvas. If a person uses Excel for prototyping, they will fundamentally change the way one uses Excel. At first, on opening Excel, there is an empty traditional spreadsheet ready to begin entering data. To create prototypes, one has to transform the traditional spreadsheet of delineated rows and columns into a blank canvas. The metaphor of the painters canvas is useful here because it has a great deal in common with what one is trying to accomplish: A blank canvas is the starting point for a creative person to visually express his or her ideas. This chapter provides a series of exercises through which a user can create an Excel canvas and set the options that make Excel a prototyping tool. The exercises are broadly categorized into three categories: preparing a canvas, hiding the grid, and changing the row and column dimensions.

Communicating Your Design in Excel

This chapter helps the user learn how to communicate their design, including design specifications, how to add a ScreenTip (tooltip) to a content hyperlink, and how to insert comments and add annotation areas. After completing a prototype version it is important that before it is passed on to others, the user should establish clear, logical design communications based on design objectives and rationale, requirements on which the user based his or her design and applied to their prototype, design guidelines and specifications, task and navigation flow mappings, priority screens, design decisions, and issues in the form of annotations. These communications help reflect which objectives one has or has not addressed in his/her prototype. They can also be used to set audience expectations regarding a prototype. Creating clear communications and setting expectations, in turn, help to avoid many of the inevitable opinion battles that often arise when presenting and rationalizing a design. Likewise, documenting personal design rationale helps users remember why somebody made certain design decisions and helps to communicate that rationale to others.

Iterating Prototypes With Excel

This chapter helps learn how to prepare for design iterations and create iterations of the users Excel prototype. The chapter helps one identify a high-priority screen—a contact information screen—and refine the design through iteration. First, the user wants to identify the kind of iteration he/she does. Though there are many perspectives on the types of iterations that can be performed, the chapter focuses on two: Will this iteration be a more detailed version of a more conceptual predecessor, and will this iteration be an improvement or change of a prior version based on stakeholder feedback or new and ostensibly improved ideas? But an iterative design process requires that there be a number of trial design attempts and divergent changes that will ultimately converge on a design solution. New requirements and content are added, features are changed or deleted, and then design elements are arranged and rearranged. Just seeing the layout of a page triggers changes as each team member evolves his or her own ideas on what the design should look like.

Sharing Your Excel Prototype

This chapter helps a user learn to use a prototype for collaboration, mitigate the risks of implementing a finished prototype, avoid the risks in sharing a prototype, and denote the prototypes interaction methods. The way one shares his or her prototypes with others and presents them will determine the effectiveness of designs and the impact they will have. Excel has many features that can help one effectively share ones prototypes with other stakeholders. The process of sharing ones design to achieve buy-in from the various stakeholders includes three important activities: collaboration, presentation, and evaluation. Rarely is a prototype the product of a single persons effort. Often many people play roles in the design process. They all have some ownership of the iterations of prototypes that go into creating software. An early prototype might begin as a product managers idea, but during the course of the design and implementation process, others will contribute their expertise and ideas. In todays world of global software creation, the people who participate in any prototyping activity might not even be on the same continent. Sharing Excel prototypes levels the playing field so everyone can contribute. People who are more visually oriented and less articulate in meetings are empowered to visualize their ideas.

Creating an Excel Prototyping Template

This chapter helps a user learn how to create a prototyping template that includes images, graphics, boxes, buttons, tab components, color key, palette, tips and tricks, table templates, and prototype starter worksheets. A template comprises worksheets in a special Excel workbook. The template contains user interface elements and useful information that one can use over and over as one builds prototypes. The template facilitates collaboration with the production team and stakeholders by enabling anyone who has the file to continue with the work that has been started. Because the template is built from the canvas worksheet that one already sets up, it has default specifications already integrated into the workbook. As the user goes through the process of building these template worksheets, he or she gains a better understanding of how to use Excel for prototyping.

Excel Prototyping: Storyboards

This chapter discusses how to think about storyboards, how to go about creating a storyboard, how to create a sample storyboard, and how to present a self-made storyboard. The storyboarding process was first developed for cartoons at the Walt Disney studio during the early 1930s and was subsequently adopted throughout the film industry. Today storyboards are used for planning ad campaigns, commercials, proposals, and other projects intended to convince or compel to action. More recently, the storyboard concept has been adapted to the process of creating software. A storyboard prototype for software can be created in different styles. One which is more like a traditional storyboard includes a series of sequential illustrated images or sketches based on accompanying narrative text. This type of storyboard communicates design concepts as a story line or a workflow. It is generally targeted to internal design team members to align the teams thinking with the goals, behaviors, and conceptual design direction of an idea, product, or service without actually detailing any screen designs. This type of storyboard can also be used in focus group studies to validate a concept or workflow with actual users. This type of storyboard is usually produced using presentation software such as Keynote or PowerPoint. In contrast, what one learns about here is a second type of storyboard, a storyboard style that mixes text with wireframes, providing a narrative of how a software concept is meant to work without actually implementing any interaction.

A Developer's Dilemma

This chapter discusses how to prototype with Excel (or another spreadsheet application with similar functionality). It deals with the larger topic of prototyping. Although the chapter does not attempt to completely cover the topic of prototyping, it discusses prototyping as it relates to prototyping with Excel. Excel is an amazing prototyping tool, because it is the only tool that is known to combine into a single tool the advantages of prototyping flexibility, efficiency and ease of use, professional results, no requirement of special skills, and ready availability. As a prototyping tool, Excel is not only easy to use; it is quite flexible for the various methods of prototyping. One can create static screen wireframes, screens with click-through interaction and navigation, and even prototypes that can be optimized for different types of usability testing. Any stakeholder who needs to express a software idea or requirement visually or interactively should use Excel.