UCD at PeopleSoft

1
UCD at PeopleSoft

• ISE 298 Professional Seminar
• San Jose State University
• October 22, 2003
• Jeff English Scott Robinson
• PeopleSoft Supply Chain Management

2
Enterprise Software

• Initially focused on
• Desktop client software
• Domain experts are users
• Complicated back-end processes
• But evolved to
• Web-based UI
• Self-service interactions
• Off-loading work of experts to novice users
• This transition has been relatively successful
  from a technology point of view, but a challenge
  from a usability perspective

3
User Experience at PeopleSoft

• Central team
• Product pillar teams
• Tools team

4
User Experience Stakeholders
5
How do we get user input now?

• Previously heuristic reviews
• Testing without context
• Shoot-from-the-hip guidance

6
Getting user input moving forward

• Iterative prototypes w/ testing
• Market user research
• Card sorting and tasks analysis
• Developing a partnership with customers and
  product users through a UE Partners Program

7
UE Activity Map
8
What are barriers to change?

• Difficulties include
• Legacy organization
• Legacy technology
• Legacy UI layout and presentation issues
• No validation of user assumptions

9
The Enterprise Development Pyramid
Roles it affects (Who needs to sign off)

• CTO
• VP of Products Technology

architectural

• Tools Group across all products
• Central UE Team

behavioral
visual
? Central Team committee

• Development (Programmers)
• Strategist (Product Manager)

linguistic
These roles build on top of one another.
10
Pyramid Linguistic Example

• What am I supposed to do here?
• Language button text are relatively easy to
  change

11
Pyramid Visual Example

• Visual grouping of content on this page is overly
  complex.

12
Pyramid Behavioral Example

• Checkboxes are grayed-out, breaking Web
  conventions.
• PeopleSoft grid or view of database rows is
  confusing to new users.

13
Pyramid Architectural Example

• Application is broken into Components Pages
• Pages are represented by Tab Navigation.

14
Pyramid Architectural Example

• Why do I see Bill To Options and its sub-page on
  the same hierarchical level?
• No way to flexibly present secondary navigation.
• Instead, this part of the application was broken
  into separate Components, creating user
  navigational complications.

15
Building a New Process and Team

• Team expanded to 3 Interaction Designers and 4
  Usability Engineers
• Focus on strategy and innovation over incremental
  improvement
• Forging relationships with customers and product
  users

16
Questions

• Thank you!
• Jeff English Scott Robinson
• jeff_english_at_peoplesoft.com scott_robinson_at_peoples
  oft.com