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!

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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Any tools can be used in the wrong way, and I believe that’s the reason many developers hate BPM. They just don’t know how the BPM tools should be used. . .and I’d love to rectify that situation right now.

If you grok Process Driven Development you will love BPM. If you don’t, then you’ll try to use your BPM tools like a traditional application development environment and you will end up with a mess.

It’s all about the Process. . .before you begin development, discover the answers to these questions in this order:

1. What are the steps?
2. What are the possible paths through the steps?
3. What data controls the path through the process?
4. What data flows through the process.

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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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