An ongoing theme in our Blueprint releases has been making the user experience as easy as possible, or “reducing the friction” as we’ve come to call it. Each new release has included changes that make it easier/faster/better to model and document your business processes. Some of these improvements are large and obvious, others are more subtle.  Across my next several posts, I’m going to focus on a few of these design changes and explain how they can have a big impact on your process discovery success.

A few weeks ago, we announced our latest release which included improvements to the process documentation view. Since then, we’ve received several emails and forum posts asking for more information on the new features and questions about things we’ll be adding in the future. All objects in your process diagram (e.g. activities, sub-processes, events, even the process object itself) have their own process documentation section, and details captured in the mapping and diagram views are rolled up into this consolidated view. This process documentation includes structured information such as the participant, business owners, experts, inputs, outputs, and problems associated with that specific object. A commonly overlooked detail is the fact that these items can be easily edited and modified from the larger process documentation view. For example, to add an additional input, just click the green “+” button next to the input row to dynamically add a new item. Most items in this structured section behave this way, making it very easy to quickly capture and compare details across multiple items. This is one of my favorite new features in Blueprint because it really helps you quickly document the details or narrative of your process without having to open separate dialogs.

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The Lombardi User Experience Team is looking for customers to help us make our products even better. We have several new features under development for both our Blueprint and Teamworks products, and we’d like to know what you think. The UX team focuses on how people interact with our software, and the information we collect is translated directly in to product design improvements - so your feedback really makes a difference!

Please contact us if you are a current Blueprint or Teamworks customer and are willing to participate in a product usability study. Most sessions last between 30 and 60 minutes and can be done remotely using Web conferencing software. During the sessions, you will be shown aspects of the product and asked to provide feedback. Your comments are valuable ways we ensure we’re building tools that fit your needs.

As noted in Dave’s Summer release post and recent product reviews, Blueprint has undergone some pretty significant UI changes in the past few months. It’s especially important to mention that the majority of these improvements are the direct result of our customer’s feedback and feature requests found in the Blueprint Community Forums. If you are an existing customer and haven’t had a chance to check out the forums yet, I invite you to do so (just click the Feedback link in the upper right-hand corner of Blueprint). There’s a wealth of information there, from tips and tricks to modeling best practices. It’s also a great way to interact directly with the Blueprint product and support teams.

A perfect example of this direct customer feedback is our new rich text editing environment found on the documentation view in Blueprint. For those of you who have been using the product for a while, you may remember that our first pass at rich text was a bit limiting - allowing users to apply simple formatting such as bold, italic or underline styles. To be honest, we weren’t entirely sure how our customers were going to use the documentation sections of the product or the types of information they’d want to store there. So we put it out there, watched, and listened to the feedback. And boy did we get a lot of feedback - in fact we quickly found that the documentation section was considered one of the most important sections of the product. Over the course of a few releases, the text editing sections evolved to support things like advanced formatting, custom font styles, lists, indenting, hyperlinks, images, and colors. We also heard from customers that they needed better integration with their existing documentation, so we included support for things like copying from Word, direct export and printing.

We’re obviously not done yet. We have big plans for improving the existing doc features and adding a few new ones (check out the forums for a few hints). We’re also looking for more feedback from you. We’re 100% committed to making Blueprint THE BEST process discovery and modeling tool available. Tell us what you need… We’re listening!

We frequently get asked about the design process here at Lombardi. First off, it’s helpful to understand a little bit about our team, which consists of folks with very diverse backgrounds in user interface and visual design, human factors and engineering. Having such a broad mix of skills enables us to come at a design problem from many different angles and explore a variety of options very quickly. We practice an iterative approach that includes rapid prototyping and end user testing. Sometimes our solutions may seem obvious – but they are usually the result of multiple iterations and variations. A perfect example of this is the new insert or “+” sign that was recently added to Blueprint.

For those of you who have been using the product for a while, you’ll remember that our first design for adding items to the process diagram was very Visio-like, with drag and drop capabilities from an application menu:

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Last week, I wrote about the importance of understanding user roles and how a successful UI allows each user to focus on what s/he does best, especially with regards cross-functional process teams (Rule #1).

It’s crucial to get these groups aligned from the very outset of a project, to get them walking lock-step with each other as soon as possible. This is Rule #2.

But how is this accomplished through the UI?

The most important thing we’ve learned about aligning cross-functional interests from a UI perspective has to do with the early discovery and documentation phases of the project. This is the first (and potentially only) opportunity to get everyone’s interests on the same page, and is exactly why we created Lombardi Blueprint.

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It is tempting to go on and on about the relationship between business and IT. Here at Lombardi we like to instead talk about effective cross-functional teams that can build the end-to-end process together. And we practice what we preach - this is why we have BPM Analysts, Consultants and Developers on our delivery teams. Note this does not mean companies have to fundamentally re-organize, but they do need to be able to create dedicated cross-functional teams if they are going to be successful.

That being said, I think that user interfaces are key to how these cross-functional teams can work together effectively. This is something that I touched on briefly in my previous post about Web2.0 and “making BPM cool again.”

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A few weeks ago we were having a conversation at SXSW here in Austin that is worth relaying.

There has been a good deal of talk about making BPM more engaging to users via Web 2.0 and Ajax, which is ultimately part of the whole Enterprise2.0 conversation. It makes me laugh, though, because Ismael Ghalimi was talking about making BPM cool again way back in 2006 – was it ever cool?

Well, anyway, we’ve obviously come a long way since then, and certainly Lombardi has been at the forefront of the UI/UE innovation since the very beginning. We recently announced the Spring 2008 release of Lombardi Blueprint, which incorporates our most evolved thinking about usability and experience.

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One of the best parts about working on an application such as Blueprint is the ability to continuously improve the product based on real customer feedback (a usability engineer’s dream). That said, we’ve got some GREAT things queued up for release this year - so keep posted here for updates. As always, we welcome your comments & feedback on how you’re using Blueprint and what we can do to help make you more successful.

Also, in case you missed it, Blueprint is featured on Google’s GWT blog. Make sure you check it out & tell your friends!