Openbravo San Fermin: Let the Bull run through your Company

Pamplona is the birthplace of our flagship product Openbravo ERP but it is probably better known for its yearly San Fermin festival where millions of people gather to watch the famous encierro, the running of the bulls. This year we wanted to share a bit of local pride with you by letting the bull run through your company as well. We´ve created a San Fermin skin that can be downloaded as a module and applied to your instance. Find the instructions here.

We´ve also painted our demo site red (http://demo.openbravo.com) , go have a look!

A special thanks to Miguel Rodriguez Font who created the bull logo, beautifully crafted using graphic characters only.

Attend a UFO on ESO

In plain English this means: Hereby I invite you to participate in a series of User Feedback Opportunities (UFOs) on the Enhanced Sales Order Flow redesign project (ESO) we have started recently.

The objective of these sessions is to gather feedback on our design work. Using the input given, we can then modify, improve and tweak iteratively, leading eventually to a high quality, tested and low-risk design that will be used in Openbravo ERP 3.0.

The dates are as follows:
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Wednesday June 16th, 11.30-12.30h
(replacing Product Development meeting)

Jim, The Computer Seller
Download Scenario here
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Friday June 18nd, 11.30-12.30h

Liz, The Order Taker
Download Scenario here
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Wednesday June 23th, 11.30-12.30h

Dan, The Sales Director
Download Scenario here
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Friday June 25th, 11.30-12.30h

Amy, The Customer Carer
Download Scenario here
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It is necessary to download and review the materials prior to the sessions. For every session we will use one scenario (images + story) in a PDF document. Having this document open or printed is recommended to make it easier to refer to the images.

The sessions will be held through IRC** on irc://freenode/openbravo and the sessions will be open to all. Feel free to invite business partners, colleagues or end users with an interest in sales orders.

Hopefully I will "see" you online on one (or all!) of these dates!

Rob Goris, User Experience Architect - Openbravo

**For those of you who are not familiar with IRC chatting:

The easiest way is to use the webchat from irc.freenode.net, and you don't need to install anything.

* Go to: http://webchat.freenode.net/
* Pick a Nickname
* Channels: #openbravo

You can also install Chatzilla as an extension for Firefox:
You can install Chatzilla via:
* Tools - Add-ons - Tab Get Add-ons - Enter Chatzilla in search box
* Once installed: Tools - Chatzilla
* In Chatzilla, enter:
/attach irc.freenode.net
/join #openbravo

Sales Orders with Jim & Liz

We are going to follow two of our protagonistas in real life sales order scenarios.

Jim works in a large electronics store and is selling a BigBook Pro computer to an initially unknown customer. The quote and sales order is created. The stock is checked, the delivery address is entered. The order and invoice are paid on the spot in cash.

Liz works in the financial department as an administrative assistant. She receives an email from her colleague, a sales person with a sales order attached. Liz is now going to enter this sales order in Openbravo ERP.

Both Jim and Liz spend a lot of time doing this type of activities. For them it is crucial to have an ERP that lets them create sales orders the easy, fast and smart way.

Check out the scenarios and let us know whether you think we are doing the right thing for our imaginary friends.

New Sales Order Flow

We are redesigning the Sales Order flow. This will be done from scratch, starting with customer stories, user research and process modeling. Then we´ll produce mockups that will be shared with you for feedback. The redesign will use 3.0 GUI design patterns and technology.

I´d like to ask you to share ideas, requirements, suggestions and pains here.

My Openbravo: The First Version

We are now looking at the first tab in the Openbravo ERP 3.0 GUI. It will contain a My Openbravo workspace. This should contain a set of portlets/widgets displaying metrics, links, applications or charts. Think of a portal similar to iGoogle, NetVibes and My Yahoo! where the user can decide what to show.

Have a look at the My Openbravo page and a version that shows how to edit.

It should work roughly as follows:

• Left column is filled with links to recent documents and views. Clicking them opens a new tab and takes the user there. Recent views also have Create New links.
  
• Below that we see two links that let you add widgets. The link Add Library Widget most likely opens a listbox with the available widgets. The link Add Feed Widget opens a dialog where the user enters a URL pointing at an RSS feed.
  
• What´s in the widget is not really the important point now, but I have created some examples that you can find in the presentation mentioned below.
  
• In the widget header there are two buttons: maximize and edit. Edit will pop out a little green menu that shows a number of options to move, edit and delete the widget. The first menu option Edit this widget will invoke the bigger green panel (as shown in the Invoiced widget) where attributes can be modified. In this case the user can set the time range.
  
• Consultants should be able to create (or modify) widgets where grids are shown with a number of columns/attributes, possibly cheered up by a graph. The consultant then also determines which attributes can be set (when the user clicks edit).
  

As a first set, I would propose to produce at least one grid-chart widget, an RSS feed widget, alerts and saved searches.

Find a more elaborate PDF presentation and leave your feedback here.

Bed Time for the Click and Scroll Myths

In site or application design, it is recommended to use best practices, rules-of-thumb and proven principles. User experience specialists validate most of their ideas and designs using those. In case they can't find any, they mostly resort to usability testing, trying to prove that something works or not.

Over the years, some of the rules-of-thumb have seeped through to the broader audience and are now widely used and abused. Some classic examples are: "Flash is Bad", "Frames Suck", "People don’t scroll!” and the most obstinate of them all must be "I should be able to find everything on a site in just three-clicks!".

The first two claims at least can be defended with reasoning and by the simple fact that Jakob Nielsen´s words are not to be disputed. The claims that user don´t scroll and that every page must be reached within three clicks are myths. There is no scientific proof or sound reasoning behind them.

In the case of scrolling, some 15 years ago many first time web users had to get used to content being spread out over a larger vertical area that needed scrolling to be viewed. Now, in 2010, it is not hard to assume that people learned how to use a mouse. Obviously, for advertising, being above the fold makes sense as more people will see your ad when landing on the page (where else are they going to look?). In the context of user tasks, users are willing to scroll, although they say they don't. Even Jakob Nielsen succumbed in 1997 and wrote that scrolling is now allowed.

My favorite myth is the Three-Click-Rule. In countless discussions with clients, management and developers I have heard this "argument" being used. I confess that I even shamelessly used it against others when it served me well. I have always kept my mouth shut when The Myth was used against me when designing e-commerce sites because it always made sort of sense to me to get that 12-piece knife set in gift wrapping as soon as possible in the basket and checked out before the customer changes her mind. And even in this case research has shown that The Myth does not hold true. User Interface Engineering (UIE) conducted an analysis showing that there wasn't any more likelihood of a user quitting their purchase process after three clicks than after 12 clicks. In the same analysis we can find that user satisfaction does not suffer with more clicks either: Fewer clicks do not make more satisfied users.

So, user frustration and success rates in task completion do not depend on the number of clicks. Nor do they rely on not having to scroll. What really matters is that users can find what they are looking for, which depends on many factors such as flow, layout, interaction and visual design. If users find what they are looking for in a logical (and therefore effortlessly reproducible & memorizable) manner, both success rates in task-completion and user satisfaction will be higher.

Most - if not all - of the research on these topics was conducted on web sites rather than applications but I suspect little difference in its applicability. In the case of business applications, such as ERP software, we need to be a little bit more careful because of the factor productivity. Productivity is output per unit which in most cases can be captured as work per time unit. This is where speed comes in. In our case, the speed of operation of the user is very important. It depends on the response time of the system and the user interface. The first is a purely technical matter; the second depends on the GUI design. I believe that the number of clicks and the amount of scrolling has little impact on the user productivity as long as the user has easy access to all information that is needed for the task at hand and all steps in the task flow are logical, predictable and reversible. Also: providing defaults, offering validation, saving preferences and supporting different modes of seeking information boosts user´s productivity.

If we look at an example of creating a sales order: Most of the time spent executing this task is spent on finding documents and entering and validating field values, either for headers or lines and in grids or forms. The time spent on clicking and scrolling is negligible compared to that. Making sure the user finds the right documents, processes, forms and fields and making sure that she performs the process steps in the right order without making mistakes is much more important.

Another great productivity enhancer is using keyboard shortcuts. Here the same applies: the amount of key presses is not very important, the underlying logic is.

There is nothing negative to be said against trying to minimize the amount of mouse clicking or scrolling, it even helps designers rethink their solutions and simplify process steps. They just should not be used as a rule or best practice. Let´s put these click and scroll myths to bed and start focusing on good design.

Photo courtesy of Thad Zajdowicz

Test Drive the new Selector

Selecting an object such as a business partner or a product "on the fly" while editing a form is a frequent task. In the current ERP we support this by providing a UI Selector that lets you choose the object using filters in a popup. The solution we have used so far is very powerful but not very usable. Clearing filters is awkward and it does not support suggestions or any other assistance in speeding up the filtering process.

With the new UI Selector we believe these problems will be past tense. Using SmartClient technology we have built a UI Selector that makes use of suggestions (using live filtering) and applies column filtering in the grid.

We have created a test instance where you can play with the new selector.

Go to http://79.125.36.179/openbravo/security/Menu.html

Log in with selector/test

Navigate to Sales Management > Transactions > Sales Order. The business partner and product selector have been enabled for the sales order header and line.

You can use the following keyboard shortcuts:

Ctrl-enter opens the popup /layer
Alt-arrow-down opens the suggestion dropdown

The new selector can be defined without programming. The definition is done in the application dictionary similar to windows and tabs. Selectors can be changed at runtime by a consultant without re-starting the system or re-compiling.

We intend to initially publish this as a commercial module and later open it up to the whole community as part of Openbravo ERP 3.0.

Let us know your findings on the UX Lab.