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)
It’s been a tough couple of days on the MIGTurbo CRM 2.0 project. I’ve been working on the code to Display and Edit Client Details. It’s nothing spectacularly complex or detailed, of course, but there was a niggling issue that was bugging me.
