A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

About PLM Islands and Russian Search

About PLM Islands and Russian Search
Oleg
Oleg
11 June, 2013 | 3 min for reading

Recently, I’ve been talking a lot of search paradigm and findability in PLM. In many aspects, web search changed our life. Search remains one of the fundamental user experience in consumer space and web. We search for tasks, locations, emails, friends, events and many other things. Search is different when we speak about business. Enterprise search as a software that helps to search information inside applications data sources inside a company is around many years. However it is a different type of solution even today. In PLM domain, we can different patterns of search development by vendors. I described some of them here – Multiple Facets of PLM search.

One of the most interesting patterns related to search are actually starts after you find a desired sources of information. One of the trends here is to simplify user experience and make search rich and actionable. You probably familiar with Google Rich Snippet functionality. It presents a combined set of information about the result and some actions (sometimes buttons and sometimes other user interface elements) that can lead you to a target web site or specific activities. However, Google is not alone in their strategy to make information access easier and actionable.

Here is another example of actionable search user experience. It called Islands and it presented by Russian search company – Yandex. Navigate your browser to the following article – Think Google’s rich snippets are useful? Russia’s Yandex goes one better. The following passage explains how Yandex islands functionality works:

Let’s say the user searches for “Moscow Berlin air tickets.” A normal search result will link to an airline’s website. A rich snippet will also present direct links to the airline’s booking or special offers pages, perhaps along with the airline’s telephone booking number and its opening times. An island, or interactive snippet, could present a form through which the user can check into their flight online or begin the booking process based on real-time data – right from within Yandex’s search results.

Yandex Islands and Google Rich snippets made me think about some user experience transformations in PLM user experience. Think about transforming results into actionable information. Couple of examples. Working with document reviews scenario. You search for documents and have the ability to access multiple viewable including sharing and review actions. Another one is more related to structured processes like engineering change order (ECO). This scenario can start from ECO search. When you found a specific ECO, can get an access to important ECO details (description, dependencies) as well as make action (review, approve, etc.). I’m sure can come with more examples how to turn regular PLM scenarios easier with the use of rich search user interface.

What is my conclusion? User experience excellence. This is what matters these days. It is about how to innovate by focusing on small details of interaction between users and software. It is about how to optimize information and action flow. To eliminate additional clicks, switches between screens and bring some consumer practice to enterprise systems like PLM is the goal. It can be an interesting step towards future PLM excellence. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
12 January, 2016

One of my best blogging buddies in product lifecycle management and President of Lifecycle Insight Chad Jackson open 2016 with...

15 November, 2012

Integration is a tough job. Especially when it comes to the enterprise software. The typical manufacturing company landscape is siloed...

4 October, 2012

During the last two days I attended Autodesk University Russia in Moscow (AU.RU). This year event got a status of...

31 August, 2017

PLM news of the day – Arena Solutions Receives Strategic Growth Investment from JMI Equity. Founded back in 2000, Arena...

9 July, 2009

The following press release two days ago drove my attention. Kalypso, the world’s premier innovation consulting firm, announces the launch...

4 April, 2013

Native Apps vs. HTML5 enabled web user experience? This is a dilemma for many developers these days.  People are spending...

6 January, 2012

About a year ago, I published my post – Will PLM Channels Survive The Cloud Era? Back that time, it...

19 October, 2012

It was long time since I talked about Google and PLM. Probably, it was too long. Yesterday night, I got...

15 May, 2023

The topic of “intelligent part numbers” (IPN) came across again. This time it caught my attention via the post on...

Blogroll

To the top