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

PLM Usability and Social News Aggregators

PLM Usability and Social News Aggregators
Oleg
Oleg
10 September, 2010 | 2 min for reading

Yesterday discussion about PLM usability made me think more about how to come with ideas to improve usability of PLM systems. I wanted to come to something different than just claiming “yet another system that provides a different level of usability”. Such a type of messages is often failing when a customer actually started to work with a system. Polished user interface looks great. However, when a user drill down to nuts and bolts, appears as another lipstick on a pig.

Thinking about usability I found a very interesting trend in news reading applications. Do you remember old teletext systems? Ha… their time is over. News is a special space. We are all reading news. They are coming from multiple places. Few years ago, we had a single source of news – emails. Subscription on emails was a simple space to be informed. Google alert service didn’t change much in this mechanism, since alerts still can be delivered as emails. However, social media revolution changed a lot in the news industry. These days, a significant portion of news is coming from alternative sources – social networks, microblogging, video, etc. I found few interesting applications that representing a new class of news aggregators.

Flipboard

This iPad application aggregate news coming from multiple channels as well as you twitter and Facebook accounts. What I specially like in this application is the ability to visualize hidden resources such as video and pictures links. Normally, social net stream on twitter and other social networks is very boring. You need to follow links to get to a picture or video. Flipboard changed this behavior. Now you can see it. Now, imagine you Bill of Material discover becomes as simple and natural as reading social news streams in Flipboard.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDARc7jhM8U]

Pulse News

Another news aggregator – Pulse provide multi-dimensional stream scrolling. What I like in this app is the ability to visualzie structured streams of information. This can be an interesting experience for reviewing of information normally presented in PDM and PLM systems as boring streams.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVjn27OdDBE]

What is my conclusion? The bad old days of enterprise software are over. Consumer apps are bringing a new and different way to consume information. Gen-Y is coming to enterprise organization and have these new behaviors in their mind. Do we still want to see boring Bill of Materials’ sheets and endless structured trees? Nope. It seems to me time for change is coming. Bill of Material in PLM systems looks like old teletext. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
11 November, 2023

Let’s talk about the importance of digital transformation and the challenges that manufacturing companies are facing in product lifecycle management,...

14 September, 2018

Multi-tenancy is an application architecture in which a single instance of the application is used by multiple customers. Think about...

12 June, 2015

PI Congress is coming to Boston this year. The program just became available online and you can see it here....

21 May, 2020

PLM marketing and strategy these days are shifting towards everything “digital”. The number of “digital” articles is growing. While selling...

5 October, 2018

It has been long time since I covered Autodesk PLM in my blog. Time is running fast and it has...

7 October, 2017

Dear Readers, This is a beginning of guest blogging on Beyond PLM. I welcome everyone to share your thoughts about...

20 October, 2016

  Culture eats strategy for breakfast. You probably heard the phrase usually attributed to Peter Druker. Did Peter Druker really said this?...

15 October, 2022

I’m catching up on the news and materials from Autodesk University 2022, which took place after the two years break...

29 April, 2023

I’m heading to the CIMdata PLM roadmap event next week in DC and wanted to give you a sneak peek...

Blogroll

To the top