Personas are a tool we use in SaaS design to remove bias, build consensus, identify functionality/design opportunities, and tailor the SaaS environment to various segments to improve productivity and enable faster, more agile business processes and cycles.
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Undoubtedly you have heard about the great RIA war raging between Apple and Adobe. Apple claims that HTML5 is all you need and Flash has no future. Adobe shoots back that Flash is the best choice today and claims that it will remain relevant 3-5 years from now. So how do we make sense of this brouhaha as it relates to our own work designing SaaS and Rich Internet Applications for the Enterprise?
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When it comes to sustainability "Doing the right thing for the planet" is laudable on its own. But from a business perspective there needs to be other monetary, social and legal drivers to motivate action and for initiatives to succeed over the long term. What are the some of the common drivers behind organizational sustainability initiatives?
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David Bryne (Talking Heads) recently described how artists evolve styles of music that works for the environment in which it will be heard. This should also be true for UI design. Good mobile application is not just about creating simpler and more streamlined interfaces of desktop applications, it is about understanding how the context changes what makes for effective activities and designing for the limitations and unique opportunities enabled by the device.
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With on-premise software, profitability is defined by the intellectual property of the code and the value that it can command on a per-seat license. With SaaS, value is defined by the user experience that leads to customer retention and recurring revenue.
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This year Catalyst has seen a significant shift in our areas of focus and the kinds of applications and interfaces we are engaged to develop. Part of this reflects changes in our own areas of interest, particularly our work to support and develop sustainability initiatives. But I believe the shifts also reflect a larger move in the industry itself.
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I was thinking about Catalyst Resources and the way that we describe what we do. Sure we design Rich Internet Applications and efficient, aesthetic interfaces. We even target this by focusing on mission critical applications and modular, reusable UI. But this 'what' is not the motivator that actually makes us wake up every morning and go to work. That is not the 'why' we do what we do. What is in our DNA as a company, is a belief that we can make the world better, one application at a time.
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Many of our recent engagements have been around designing instrument control for mission critical applications. These interfaces enable workers to interact with equipment via an interface rather than mechanical gauges, switches and levers. These types of interfaces present their own unique set of challenges.
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I often talk about how mission critical applications have unique requirements when it comes to RIA and user experience design. Broadly speaking mission critical applications require a combination high-performance, at-a-glance clarity, security, redundancy, scheduling, reporting and scalability. I found that the easiest way to explain these terms was to give examples from our own client work.
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One of the challenges when discussing sustainability, has been to find a concise way to describe and organize the diversity of services and the potential $$s that fall under the rubric of sustainability. I've come up with a simple framework for classifying various sustainability efforts and services - a kind of Sustainability System of Record.
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What are the best practices in perceived performance for web applications that improve the user experience as well as a company's bottom line? Do small changes in perceived performance really make a quantifiable difference?
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Cleantech will struggle to compete head-on against incumbents in established markets. It will take time to take root and become widespread. So I see the need for a parallel sustainability track focused on using software and hardware to optimize and manage existing energy and waste/resource management technology. But for sustainability software applications to succeed we need to innovate with user experience.
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Most of the pundits for health care IT concur that a move to electronic records and in particular, a move to a SaaS, will significantly benefit insurance companies, hospitals, and physicians. But how and where does a company start in developing a SaaS solution? How do you undertake the project without creating a bloated, interminably delayed IT nightmare.
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I've been meeting with many VC firms, investors, and industry leaders in the Valley and it is readily apparent to me that sustainability is a topic on everyone's mind and and a business opportunity on which many startups and established players will focus over the next 5-10 years. Energy and environmental optimization will become a massive industry beginning in 2010. SaaS and user experience will play a central role in making sustainability applications successful.
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Increasingly, the driving force behind our clients wanting to move their business to a Software-as-a-Service model and using Rich Internet Applications, is the need to interact with customers and/or data in real-time, and to respond quickly to competitive opportunities or threats.
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Clients often ask which Rich Internet Application development tool they should choose - Flex, Silverlight, or an AJAX framework. While there are no hard and fast rules for selecting one technology over the other, there are some rules of thumb.
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While many of our engagements are focused on full-scale redesign projects or new venture capital-back startups, another large segment of our work is devoted to retooling projects where companies need to migrate legacy applications to SaaS or Rich Internet Applications. Here, reusable UI design systems can play an especially significant role in streamlining redevelopment cycles and shortening implementation windows.
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The financial services industry is undergoing a significant transformation in how applications are designed and delivered. A key driving force behind this shift is the growing imperative to be global both in terms of providing customer-facing services and in taking advantage of a distributed global workforce.
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You may have noticed that CatalystReources.com has added a new Case Studies and Clients section. Our purpose for adding these sections is to give visitors a quick visual sampling of the types of projects and clients we have worked with.
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Building modular, reusable user interface components is different from building custom application UI. Reusability however, although easy in concept, is not easy in practice. Each UI component needs to work as an independent (but cooperative) 'machine' with a distinct role or responsibility.
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While many SaaS services like to explain the value of their SaaS in terms of features (it does X) or cost saving (it is cheaper than on-premise), reality is that these 'value propositions' position your service as a commodity. It is inevitable that a new SaaS firm will end up beating you at your own game (price and features). An alternative value proposition is to design the SaaS to incorporate your entire extended enterprise into the business process - your customers, partners, and suppliers.
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Last week it was announced that Amazon has purchased the hot e-commerce up-and-comer Zappos. Among the many things I found interesting about this announcement was how I didn't associate any kind of logo or visual identity with either company. The brand that defines these online companies are not the visuals that the typical interactive design firm spends so much time developing. The brand for these web companies is the interface and user experience.
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Effective on-boarding is critical in terms of determining the tenure and profitability of a SaaS customer relationship. The challenge for SaaS vendors is to immediately gain and leverage an early understanding of new customers behavior and then drive relevant communications to facilitate both immediate on-boarding and continued engaged use for the first 60 days. Monitoring at the user experience level is an effective way both to to correct drop out points during the first 60 days, improve effectiveness and efficiency for your customers, and quickly determine how to modify your application on a regular cycle to meet user needs, increase sales and up sell, and reduce churn.
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Pure on-demand SaaS is not appropriate to all business models. The underlying business value of a piece of software may require unique customer processes, or complex integration tasks that can't be automated. But the steps in the SaaS life cycle framework are still appropriate for developing a roadmap on how to design your SaaS. Examine the touch-points in the life cycle and determine how you design your application to address them - based on your specific business and technological situation.
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"A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution is not simply a new way to package and deliver applications. It is a fundamental shift in the relationship between the software service provider and the customer." This is the kind of thing you read all of the time in the IT press or hear from pundits at conferences. By now most senior executives in companies are saying "OK, I understand I have to have a new mindset. But what $@!% does that really mean in terms of how I build my application and my business?"
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I was reviewing the latest FinTech 100 and noticed that 4 of the top 10 firms are recent or current clients of Catalyst Resources. To be sure, the economic downturn has impacted the financial services sector and almost everyone is aggressively seeking ways to cut costs. However we find that many of these firms are also responding by investing in new applications that improve ROI, manage risk, reduce business process inefficiencies and attract new customers.
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Choosing the right application design firm for a mission critical application, is in itself a mission critical decision. If only you could give a potential firm a test drive to learn how they think.
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Designing for viral adoption can be particularly relevant to SaaS, where profitability depends on quickly achieving and retaining a critical mass of users.
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It used to be in the healthcare arena, that investment dollars followed the companies searching for the next new breakthrough drug or treatment. Recently however, the opportunities and incentives (i.e. $19 billion) have started to shift to less glamorous products aimed at health care efficiency, and cost-control using SaaS, RIAs and optimized user experience design.
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Since choice of infrastructure for your SaaS is as much of a bet-the-farm decision, as designing the right user experience, you need to be diligent in your research. I generally don't advice clients on particular cloud computing platforms since it is ultimately based on your own development resources, estimates of growth and your unique SaaS life-cycle application strategy. However there are some high-level recommendations I can make.
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VCs are betting on SaaS and Cloud Computing as the future. So if you have an existing solution that uses on-premise software, do you need to replace it now with a SaaS and cloud infrastructure?
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You can’t visit a technology or business-related website these days without running into the terms Software as a Service (SaaS ), Cloud Computing, Rich Internet Applications (RIA) or User Experience (Ux). The technologies and best practices that define these terms are evolving rapidly and it is difficult for our clients and potential clients to sift through the burgeoning literature and blogs and find SaaS and UX content that is not filtered through the lens of an infrastructure or service management provider. So we have put together the SaaS Application Design Resource Center, our take on the weeks most relevant articles, blogs, whitepapers and guides.
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One way in which Catalyst differentiates itself from other SaaS and RIA providers is our extensive experience with developing modular and reusable UI. But what do I actually mean when I use the terms modular and reusable and is it important to your project?
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Simplicity, consistency, performance and innovation are particularly important for enterprise SaaS and RIA application user interfaces where expectations are high and and types of uses can range from rapid in-and-out use to all day reliance. Another often overlooked, but very important attribute is perceived control. In fact, in many ways, a user's feeling of being in control is what defines their perceptions of simplicity, consistency, performance and innovation.
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Modularity and reuse are standard practices for most coders and absolutely mandatory for scalable application development. But the imperative for modularity in SaaS application UI design is often overlooked. This is surprising because since SaaS is inherently a scalable application and all about the ability to be quickly reconfigured to adapt to changing market conditions.
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The market for Software as a Service (SaaS) is becoming hyper-competitive with demands for ever shrinking release cycles. For companies that offer a SaaS solution, this means focusing design and development on releases that add immediate and significant business value. Agile design methodology can help achieve this focus.
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The progression along the economic value continuum for any product or service, is from a focus on goods and services, to a focus on user experience. This is particularly true for SaaS, where the features of the software can quickly become commodities. It is the user experience that can provide real economic value and differentiation.
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To be sure, the functionality that an application provides to users is important for differentiation. But it is the way in which that application provides the functionality truly gives a piece of software the edge. User experience is the key differentiator relative to the competition.
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Since customization continues to be a hot topic in the SaaS industry and often a stumbling block to adoption for many types of businesses, I wanted to briefly review how a SaaS can be designed to allow for easy customization and configuration of everything from terminology/lexicon and branding/layout, to individualized workflows, to data model extensions, to integration from other systems, to access control for each tenant and even to business logic.
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It's an old cliche that technology innovation thrives in times of recession. But we think this will actually be true for user experience and application design in 2009. So for this post I want to offer some predictions where the user experience market is headed. I've also asked several Catalyst Resources staff members to contribute their thoughts.
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