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

PLM and Re-thinking UI paradigms

PLM and Re-thinking UI paradigms
Oleg
Oleg
11 October, 2011 | 2 min for reading

I’m spending more and more time with alternative UIs. It first started from mobile and web. Now it is coming from everywhere. Retrieving my old memories about SCO/Xenix, DOS and Windows, my hunch is we are going to another UI paradigm shift very soon. During this long weekend, I was reading Adopting the metro style for line of business apps blog post by Bil Simser. Take a read. The fact it is coming from analyzes of Windows Metro makes it even more interesting. I wrote about metro style few weeks ago in one of my posts.

A Typical PLM User Experience

Can you think about typical PLM/PDM user experience? It goes that way: TREE VIEW -> LIST VIEW -> ITEM VIEW. Most of PLM (and not only) user interfaces built around this paradigm. Therefore, the following passage co-sounded:

Metro is different. It forces you to think about your application in a different manner. No longer are you trying to get tree view feeding items into list view feeding details into file view. There are still groups and collection of groups and all that but remember your UI now is a functional, breathing, living thing. Minimalism is best here so you want to get out as much information in as effective space as possible. As Microsoft pointed out, a live tile isn’t something you should be posting every detail to. It’s an extension of the application so treat it as a first class citizen, not a UI element that needs to be pretty.

If you think about the following picture (credit to Bil Simser post), you probably will see a long list of applications that you have in use these days in your company.

New paradigms: Tasks and Virtual Assistant

Where do you think new paradigms will be coming from? In my view, the majority of them will come as a re-thinking of web 2.0 websites and mobile applications. One of my favorite applications for the last two years on my iPhone is Siri. I wrote about Siri almost two years ago here – What are your questions to PLM Virtual Assistant? I’m so glad to see Siri is finally coming to iPhone 4S these days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3H8Mcc8XEV0

What is my conclusion? I think, time is coming to re-think an old way of designing enterprise applications. It won’t be simple. The biggest problem, in my view, is a significant investment made by companies in existing software. So, the question of ROI, etc. will have to be answered. However, new users will demand new stuff to come. So, it is inevitable. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
4 January, 2013

3D printing is still a narrow niche play zone. In my view, we are not going to see 3D printer...

21 September, 2019

Cloud application development is everywhere these days. However, CAD users are stuck in the desktop reality. There are many reasons...

28 April, 2017

To speak about value of PLM is a tough job. I did it many time in my previous life –...

20 November, 2009

How many times you’ve been in the situation when you need to explain what PLM is doing to the people...

23 September, 2009

I’d like to discuss RIA today. RIA – Rich Internet Applications are web applications that have most of the characteristics...

7 July, 2013

One of the looongest US weekends I remember  is going to end. This is a time to get back from...

23 October, 2011

I want to talk about an interesting segment of cloud technologies – cloud SQL Database. For the last months, I’ve...

12 September, 2009

Web is coming to every place. I think in retrospective and see web as a next big change in the...

3 May, 2021

SaaStr blog Gartner: SaaS Spending Will Grow Another 40% in Next 2 Years Alone brings some interesting data points about SaaS...

Blogroll

To the top