Let’s talk about User Interface today. Something that we call UX (User Experience) nowadays. The importance of user experience can be hardly undervalued. The days when a user interface wasn’t important gone, and customers are demanding from software vendors to provide a different level of product usability.
What is the path to a good UX?
Well. We agreed – user experience is a very important thing.Take a look on the picture below. I’m sure, many of you, reading now this blog post and watching this picture can go in your product development, PDM, PLM system and find some similarity with this UI.
However, how practically we can achieve these results? One of my favorite online publications, UX Magazine, published an interesting article – Overhauling a UI Without Upsetting Current Users. I recommend you to have a read. I found to the concept of “redesign by evidence” interesting and valuable. However, my favorite passage is related to “usability testing”:
Usability testing is very different from beta testing. In beta testing, users will typically only report usability problems that make it very difficult for them to accomplish a task—in other words, things that are very clearly bugs. They typically won’t report that they found something challenging or unintuitive. People don’t always like to admit that they failed at something. Also, beta testers (or at least the ones who take time to report issues) are often fans of the product, and are therefore also power users. They may have already learned to work around or ignore usability issues.
This is a key, and many PLM systems failed to accomplish that. To test systems with “mainstream users” and not only “product fans” is very important.
Cloud PLM and Usability Testing
In my view, cloud product architecture and development introduces new opportunity to develop a better user experience. Cloud is eliminating long development cycles and making software to be available on demand. It creates a possibility to experiment with individuals as well as user groups in a very granular form. It allows to achieve a next level of usability testing almost identical to the level consumer web brands have these days.
What is my conclusion? Cloud product development opens new horizons for PLM. Cloud product development and testing provide new platforms and capabilities for usability testing and variety of user experiments. As a result, PLM companies will have an opportunity to achieve an improved level of UI quality compatible with the quality of consumer and web products. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
