Island Web Works

Charles recently blogged about the challenges around making improvements to established products and designs. MIGTurbo is a successful CRM package and is evangelised and valued by its users. One of the reasons behind this, we believe, is the supremely simple and quick user interface. We are currently internally testing the next version, MIGTurbo 1.9, and this has a number of exciting new features which will further enhance the user experience - or ‘UX‘ to its friends.

So when moving towards the next major milestone in the MIGTurbo roadmap, MIGTurbo 2.0, it presents a challenge to us. While we are looking forward to being able to provide more features and better performance with a contemporary design, we must balance that with what we know has made the product such a success up until now … and that is the simplicity of the user-experience.

One thing I have really appreciated since joining Island Web Works is the opportunity for frank discussions about everything from the fundamentals of the Microsoft SQL Server Paging mechanism to the finer details of Natural Selection. These discussions have allowed me to come into the business as a new member of the team and also as a new and fresh user of the MIGTurbo application while still being able to contribute my opinions and outlandish statements without fear of tarnishing any egos. So when looking at what form the user experience of the 2.0 release should take, a full and frank discussion could be had. 

We quickly identified and agreed that we did not want to repeat Microsoft’s mistake with the Office 2007 user interface. Previous users of Office 2003 were able to use their years of experience using the world’s most popular office suite to create and manage their documents, spreadsheets and presentations with relative ease. Ever since Word 6.0, the user interface has been more or less consistent even as new features were added. Then, in 2007, Microsoft redesigned the entire user interface of the Word, Excel, Access and Powerpoint products to use ‘Ribbons’. Sure, the Ribbons are beautiful, and I happen to prefer them, but most users just want to get the job done and when functions not only move but appear to disappear altogether, user unrest is sure to follow. So despite extensive usability testing and user experience workflow modelling when coming up with the Ribbon Experience, users are still rejecting the user interface due to requirements of loss of productivity and requirement of re-training staff. While we need to maintain a consistent experience with previous versions, one of the key components of the MIGTurbo 2.0 roadmap is extensibility, so we equally didn’t want to restrict any opportunities in the future. We need to be able to provide extra functionality, in new places, but not disturb the central usage workflow.

Our challenge is how to maintain a consistent user experience for those users who have used the product for years, while providing visible opportunities to help them get more out of their usage of the product - but at the user’s own pace. We are working on an experience which will mirror our existing UI design and associated benefits, but will also hint at opportunities to help users focus on the job in hand. One key example I use is a month-end procedure. We want to be able to facilitate everyday use whilst accommodating specialised use, so provide the regular “everyday view” but give enough cues to help the user realise that they can extend their view on the system to perform specialised procedures even easier than before. This did not happen with Office 2007.

After the discussions we have had both today and previously, I believe we have come up with a sensible compromise. We will be maintaining the experience as much as possible for users who are already used to the system by ensuring functions and data are where they always were. There won’t be any disappearing or moved functions, but there will be additional opportunities to get more from the user experience. We will achieve this by mirroring established design patterns that have proved to work. By adopting patterns such as the Task Bar, Breadcrumbs and Menu patterns along with Web 2.0 practices, we can benefit from existing user experience. When a new user uses the new MIGTurbo for the first time, they will already know how to use the menus, how to navigate between screens and why the application feels the way it does because they will have already used the techniques in other applications. When an existing user uses MIGTurbo 2.0, they’ll have a strong degree of familiarity based on their previous experience.

It’s too early to show screenshots as the UI framework that will hold the functionality, data and plug-ins together is still very much in flux. However, we are looking forward to involving users in the latter stages of the development of the user experience to further build on our impressions and experience using MIGTurbo and seeing other users use it, both the user and the seasoned expert. This will provide us with a valuable opportunity to see user reactions at first hand and give users a valuable opportunity to further influence the design of a product many users spend all of their office day with.

Nathan MIGTurbo MIGTurbo 1.9, MIGTurbo 2.0, Office 2007, User Experience (UX)

How do you advance a technology or product when the tools you use are deprecated and the new ones are…. well in some ways, not as good!

I read somewhere that technology reaches it’s zenith just before it becomes obsolete, examples that spring to mind are the old vacuum flourecent displays used on typewriters, replaced by CRT displays, replaced by LCD displays which in turn will soon be replaced by OLED displays.

We are soon to release our MIGTurbo 1.9 revision of  our award winning CRM software, this will be the last revision of a product based upon Microsoft ASP technology, which has proven to be incredibly fast and easy to use. The next revision (version 2.0) will be based on .NETand AJAX. Whilst this is an essential milestone on our development road map, it presents a number of design ‘considerations’ that were not presented in ASP.

Sometimes ‘keeping it simple’, is not as easy as we would like.

Charles Uncategorized

Nathan  forwarded me a link recently extolling the fact that CRM is dead, long live CEM:

Whilst I don’t disagree with some of the points made in the article, I do feel that this type of argument requires you to take a ‘position’. Citing quotations such as:

“Do I have a relationship with 17 million people? I don’t think I do.
Do I interact with 17 million people? You bet.”
Jim VonDerheide, vice president, CRM Strategies, for Hilton Hotels

..to my mind completely overlooks the fact that for most small medium sized operations, CRM is actually about the business process, and getting things done ‘back-office’ in the most cost and time efficient manner thereby providing the client with an efficient and cost effective service.

It is obviously important for a business to present itself professionally and value its clients, however, let’s not lose sight of what business is about - singularly that is profit, profit pays salaries, rent, and every other incidental that needs to be paid for, lose sight of this at your peril.

Charles Articles CRM

Identifying the need for re-engineering elements of your business processes using Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) techniques is often difficult. Identifying both the need and defining a solution can present a major challenge. That’s where an experienced partner with an existing toolset can help. 

In February’s edition of Portfolio, (an Isle of Man publication targetting the local business sector. ) ‘Turbocharging your business with BPR‘,  expands on how a business identifies the need for BPR and implementing change.

Charles Publications BPR, Portfolio

(… not like I’d know of course)

Over the past few months I have been working on what was my first project involved with the MIGTurbo CRM application, the Microsoft Outlook Toolbar.

The toolbar provides access to client/contact records within MIGTurbo along with access to some of the MIGTurbo plug-ins, such as DocuMentor for attaching documents stored within MIGTurbo and TimeTracker allocating correspondence to projects. The new toolbar is built around our new MIGTurbo API, which will form the basis of MIGTurbo 2.0 and will be released later in the year.

We’ve been listening to our client’s feedback about the previous versions of the toolbar and think we have matched their expectations for reliability and performance. Although I do not agree with releasing “Beta” software out to users without a level of technical awareness, testing was going to be essential. Therefore, for the last month or so, we’ve been deploying our pretentiously titled ‘Elective Sunrise Edition’ to try and give some clients a preview of the toolbar and try to spot any issues that we wouldn’t spot until it was released “into the wild”. The response to the toolbar has been very positive and we’re pleased to say we’ve released the toolbar officially and will be installing it in the next few months.

As the developer of the toolbar, it’s a mixed time for me. I’m pleased to see it reach “Gold” status (to attach an equally pretentious title), but I’m touched by a sense of nervousness about how well it will perform in the “real world”. We’re confident in it though, having tested it in some differing networks with their own challenges (security policy, topology, organisational etc.). Although I have no idea what it would be like, I do get the sense it would be like seeing your first-born start school for the first time!

Nathan MIGTurbo DocuMentor, Outlook, TimeTracker

A recent snippet published in the Isle of Man Examiner - about how Amazon has profited from festive sales highlights; when it comes to converting visitors into purchasers, a simple format will serve you well. Unlike many retailers, Amazon was not been hit by the cutback in consumer spending.  Profit at online retailer Amazon rose 9% in the final three months of last year, as the company enjoyed a robust holiday shopping season.  I stongly suspect this has as much to do with the simplicity with which you can complete a purchase as the price/choice and selection offered. Comparing this to a recent shopping experience with eBay, where I found I had used my credit card at some earlier point and then - silly me, had forgotten my password, only highlights why simplicity is often a BIG factor in success.

Charles Douthwaite writes a weekly column called Web Snippets, published every Tuesday in The Isle of Man Examiner.

Charles Web Snippets Amazon, eBay

Developing a Web Site can be great fun and an opportunity to show the world what you can do in a modern and accessible format. But before you get started, it’s important to consider how to develop your requirements of the site. Have a look at these 10 tips to help you get started:

1. Appoint a Project Lead for the web site. This helps you form a coherent project with a central point of contact and responsibility. It helps us because we know we can talk to them and use them as a “channel” into the business.
2. Have you thought of the “back office“? Many sites, particularly e-Commerce sites, require support behind the scenes to track stock, monitor user submissions to the site and more mundane issues such as who is responsible for receiving contact requests from the site.
3. Make sure you have a clear purpose for your web site. Is it a brochureware site where visitors can find out what you’ve got to offer? Is it an extranet site that extends your internal business system(s),  helping both you and your customers? Or is it a e-Commerce site that needs to make a profit in its own right?
4. What is the site’s target audience? Are they young, old, professionals or casual shoppers? This will help decide what kind of user interface is appropriate, and what design style will work best.
5. Keep in mind increasing legal requirements for accessibility for hard of hearing or partially sighted users who may require larger text/contrasting colours or browse using alternative platforms such as braille or speaking browsers. 
6. Do you have a marketing campaign for your new web site? Remember to add your web site to all your stationery, outgoing emails and branding to embed your web site address (URL) into the minds of your [potential] customers.
7. How will the site be maintained? Will it be updated regularly? If so, you can use a Content Management System to manage your own content, such as our ACTMaster CMS.
8. How will you measure the effectiveness of your site? We can help configure statistics and analytics to help you quantify visits, but this goes hand in hand with less quantifiable analysis such as asking your new customers if they found you through your web site.
9. How interactive will your site be? While techniques such as Flash are great for users who have it, some information is better presented in a page of text - especially for optimising for search engines.
10. Having a look at how other sites look and feel can help a lot. A great starting point is our Portfolio of recent sites to help get some ideas and form a starting point for your own site.

Andreas Web Site Development Accessibility, Flash, Marketing, Tips

It’s Friday again, and what a glorious Friday it is! The sun is shining, the sky is blue and the mountains white with snow. Hopefully this weather will keep for the weekend as well. But, this being a weekday, we’re still all stuck in the office, working through our seemingly never ending lists of projects.

This week I’ve been playing around with our blog settings, switching to the iNove theme and changing the colours around a bit. I also thought it would be nice to have our mug shots as avatars next to our posts, but then Stephen had the good idea of using silhouettes instead. So, faced with the usual protests (”No! I can’t have my picture taken today!”) I’ve been taking profile snapshots of my colleagues and then photoshopping them into silhouettes. I think it turned out rather nice in the end.

Nathan has been getting far too excited over Scott Hanselman’s essential .NET Developer Tools. If you’re a developer (.NET or not) this is a list of tools well worth looking at. It covers .NET, XML, Debugging, Launching, Viewing, Editing and pretty much anything else. It’s like a sack-load of Christmas presents for a developer.

Charles is busy evangelising why CRM is ‘too strategic to abandon in recession’. He found a research article by Gartner which highlights how customer relationship management is too strategically important for businesses to abandon in the recession. As the recession deepens, however, companies are looking to drive greater efficiency and lower the costs of their CRM projects. Gartner believes that CRM is seen by many businesses as an important tool in the worsening economic environment, as it minimises customer churn and the value of each customer. The survey found that the CRM projects concerned will primarily focus both on improving customer retention and increasing wallet share. Gartner found that while there had been a shift in thinking about new CRM initiatives, the news was far from bad. “The responses to this later survey [December] indicated that, as expected, some budgets for CRM initiatives were negatively impacted, but the latest survey results showed that their earlier budget allocations for CRM initiatives largely remained in place,” said Chris Pang, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Stephen has reluctanly had to uninstall Internet Explorer 8 from his machine for the time being. The latest release, although more compatible with existing web sites than the previous Beta 2 release, seems to be more unstable with frequent crashes and other issues. Hopefully the final release due this summer will have addressed this.

So there you have it. Another week gone. As usual it’s been both challenging and rewarding, making you look forward to a couple of days off but also feeling rather excited about what next week will bring. Have a good weekend, people!

Andreas Friday Feeling Gartner CRM survey, iNove, Internet Explorer 8, Scott Hanselman

Nintendo DS: No Good for Brain Training
A recent snippet that we published reminded me of my own encounter with the ‘brain trainer’ apparently I am rated as an 80 year old. Which makes me smile, as people often comment on how quickly I am able to navigate their computer systems, write SQL queries and generally fix problems. Which got me asking, what are these devices actually training the brain to do, and should we be remotely interested?

As you get older you do become rather cynical of these ‘new fangled’ gizmo’s, which after all is said and done are simply re-hashed puzzles. If it is brown and square and has ‘I am a box’ stamped all over it, then it is probably a box. I wonder why there appears to be this obsession to re-label everything, after all - doesn’t it only make life more confusing.  A bit like software actually, keep it as simple as practical and  it will serve you well, start re-engineering it simply to be ‘more interesting’ and you are on a slippery slope to nowhere.

Charles Douthwaite publishes Web Snippets in the Manx Examiner, published every Tuesday on The Isle of Man.

Charles Web Snippets