Notes on User Experience and Design – Web2.0 and Making BPM Cool Again

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.

Personally, I decided to come to Lombardi because we are doing some things that no one else is doing on the Web 2.0 front. For example, we’re doing some amazing and well-documented work with the GWT (Google Web Toolkit) that is unique to the industry. We are even doing some things that people think are “cool” – and this is a testament to our innovative approach in UI/UE development generally.

All that being said, the compliments are very flattering, but what SXSW confirmed for me and the team was that there is a bunch of “cool” work going on out there, but very little in the enterprise software business of real business users trying to gain value out of using Web 2.0 technologies in a true business environment.

If you end up being “cool” along the way, so be it – but I can’t overemphasize the importance of focusing real users in a real business environment. In fact, that’s what this blog itself is designed to help accomplish – getting things done.

Now, don’t get me wrong – most of what is designed in the Web 2.0 field is designed to open up the user experience; things like being able to use dynamic page loading and refreshing, significant performance improvements, focusing on the content and not the tool. I think all those things are key aspects which will drive some great changes, and we are exploring these every day at Lombardi and incorporating them into our products and vision. For example, the added benefit of having zero footprint installations of Blueprint makes it increasingly easy to use.

But the takeaway is that there is no point in doing “cool” for “cool’s” sake, which, frankly, happens more often than you’d think.

For Blueprint, our goal was to speed understanding of BPM on a fundamental level. This goes way beyond just the gee-whiz factor (if anything, too much gee-whiz can slow understanding). A related goal was to speed alignment around the business case for a specific BPM project, and to make that business case accessible to everyone, from the decision-maker to the process-owner and right on down the line.

That’s what a good UI does – it articulates something from the technical side of things in a way that resonates with the business side, and vice versa. And this is a challenge that is specific to a lot of enterprise applications, in fact.

I’m really excited about some of the things we’re doing and the envelope we’re pushing with Blueprint right now. We are driving innovation and we’re starting to see a new level of excitement among our more traditional clients, which tells me that the message of leveraging these new technologies to benefit real users is resonating with a pretty wise audience, not just the early adopters. We’re creating new interaction paradigms on the Web that are starting to show up across our business, which I think are really going to create lasting benefit across our customer and user base.

But remember – this all sounds good on paper, but the “coolest” thing about any UI is when it. Just. Works. There’s beauty in that, and it takes a great UI/UE design team to pull it off. Why? Because it’s easy to get distracted, and difficult to remain focused on delivering real value. The rest is just gravy.

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