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by Russell Wilson
This is a follow-up article to "Why UI Design is Important - and so Difficult - in Enterprise Apps"
There are many iterations to a well constructed interface. The way we typically approach it is first from the idea of usability. What is the user trying to accomplish and how can we provide interactive elements that let them do that in the easiest way? Initially you work with a wireframe -- rough sketches applied to scenarios. Once you have something that makes sense, you create an interactive prototype to test some of the more complex interactions. Good testing at this stage saves money down the road. Then comes polish and aesthetics. The polishing process has more of an effect than just making the product “look good.” The application of real graphic design principles such as grid layout, the golden ratio, and the gestalt principles of perception have a huge impact on the ease of interaction with screen elements and the emotional ties a user develops with the product.
Many product offerings – including our own at NetQoS – were developed independently by different teams, which resulted in very different interfaces. We've made a lot of progress bringing those products together into a single suite, sharing common controls – for example: if you can print to PDF in one product, you should be able to print to PDF in another product and it should work the same way in all products.
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A very important part of design is testing users. What you may think is obvious and intuitive, might not be. You might expect users to behave a certain way and they just don’t. User testing creates a huge return on investment for the amount of time and effort we at NetQoS put into it, but it’s very time consuming, as you have to conduct observation in the field and analyze many recordings of users performing various tasks.
We did a test in Las Vegas at Cisco Networkers, where we asked users to configure a router. About half of the users started looking for configuration – a setting and administration page. The other half started looking for the router – looking for the object first and then a way to configure that object. So you have two very different ways, split about 50/50, of how to do the same task. You have to take this into consideration when designing. There are pros and cons to forcing users to learn one way of doing something, and there are pros and cons to providing many ways of doing something to satisfy all usage-scenarios.
In the design process, you always have to take into account the constraints and limitations that you’re dealing with. For example, web-based products – like the NetQoS product offerings – have to deal with Web-safe colors, browser dimension, browser state, and many other idioms and behaviors. Like the back-button – the fact that you can be in one state and hit the back button and go somewhere else. Those things can be difficult, especially when it comes to colors and sizing. There are also issues like placement. If you do a traditional desktop application, you have a lot of control over the presentation of the product. In Web-based product, in some cases, when a customer resizes their browser the positioning of controls can change. There are a lot of issues like that with web-based products, but on the other hand, the usability can sometimes benefit because users are comfortable and familiar with Web browsers.
The complexity of our products also makes UI development difficult. Our products have a large array of functions and features, and a great deal of networking science to them. You need a great deal of sophistication in the program’s functions and features in order to make a program intuitive to end-users, and our products are no different.
We spend a lot of time thinking about interaction design, information architecture, data visualization, graphic design, and workflow, which probably isn’t realized or recognized by a lot of people. In the end, they just see a screen and they have no idea how many iterations of improvement went into that. But it really is a big part of the process and you end up with a much better product.
I’m working on the outline for a book right now, tentatively titled “Incremental Design for Enterprise Applications.” The concept is that what enterprise UI designers usually run into are situations where there is an existing product where you just can’t start from scratch. You can’t just take an existing, in-use enterprise app and wipe it clean. You have to take an incremental approach, identifying the things that will give you the most bang for the buck without compromising the project even further, and working from there. That’s a much harder prospect – from the designer’s perspective - than designing from scratch, and that’s the situation enterprise UI designers encounter most of the time.
Russell Wilson is Director of Product Design at NetQoS.
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