“You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” So goes the saying, and it seems like only yesterday that we were in the age of green and black screens when the advent of the internet triggered record levels of investment in the technology market looking for the definitive killer app with a modern user interface. look and feel. for users.
Looking back on user experiences of past technology systems compared to today can fill you with nostalgia and dread, passing relatively short-lived client/server and thin client technology innovations along the way. Spending huge sums just to make something look good without underlying functionality was – and still is – foolish, as we will discover.
Early origins – back to the 80s
The battle for desktop supremacy and the user experience began in the early 1980s and the Apple vs Microsoft wars. The user experience is then tightly integrated with the operating system and, in Apple’s case, the hardware, so the focus is more on overall functionality than just look and feel.
For those who appreciate the beauty of innovation, the idea is encapsulated in Steve Jobs’ much-quoted design principle: “You have to start with the customer experience and go back to the technology – not the other way around.” This ensured that Apple in many ways leapfrogged Microsoft in terms of delivering end-user experience, although Bill Gates’ opportunistic and entrepreneurial flair ensured that Microsoft Windows ultimately won and monopolized the Battle of Desktop. The rest, as we know, is history.
Technology should exist to make our lives easier and for the better. Accessibility and enabling ability to allow us to avoid mundane repetitive activities and maximize our time is the very essence of the digital experience. Great experiences enabled by technology always empower the user.
SaaS cloud applications continue to make quantum leaps in an era of design thinking where we are constantly reinventing work through the employee experience. This is done with the knowledge that today it is all about creating immersive digital experiences for customers and employees, crossing an enterprise architecture and the functional silos found in organizations and found in ERP modular system design.
Dawn of the SaaS cloud era – the strength of the user experience
At the beginning of the SaaS cloud era for business applications, circa 2011-2019, the clear industry leader was work day. The Pleasanton, California-based brand has made significant investments to ensure its human capital management (HCM) offering is highly intuitive, easy to use and provides an engaging experience.
Emboldened by the belief that ‘sex sells’, Workday began Oracle in terms of look and feel, and quickly used it to gain market share and build product adoption momentum. Just to keep things balanced, that should be remembered SAP is nowhere to be found, despite siled HCM functionality within the ERP giant’s moderately successful stand-alone offering, SuccessFactors.
The cloud era of SaaS saw the look and feel of the user interface in the mind of the consumer as a higher requirement than the underlying functionality of the system. Organizational buyers, surprisingly or not, are willing to spend a lot of money on something that looks good. After all, comparing legacy SaaS applications on accessibility and usability against on-premise applications is an easy win, and this has been a major recurring theme in the market.
Subsequently, all vendors have increased R&D spending and focused on user experience, with simplification and ease of use being the constant drivers.
The extremes vendors have gone to are significant, such as for example retina eye scanning, recording how a user sees the screen and accesses functionality, then uses the results to reconfigure the system accordingly. .
However, even with all the advances in user experience, platform vendors are still locked into a suite of application silos. People, regardless of being a customer or an employee, knowingly and unknowingly use multiple front of house and middle office systems to access a service.
Changing conversation – systems of experience
With technology changing so fast, the days of arguing over field position on a screen, list of values, and how beautiful a web browser screen is, for the true pioneers of the experience economy, are long gone. ours. The purchase criteria of previous SaaS systems is no longer the only overriding factor.
The dawn of the #experienceeconomy has seen the rise of experience platforms, first announced in 2019, with the likes of Salesforce and Service Today leading the charge and bringing the game to ERP vendors.
While such systems could easily exist, the competitive nature of the industry naturally saw these platforms considered taking ERP market share. Experience platforms are not ERP systems, and although there are some gray areas, overall they can digitize work in a way that work is actually done within an organization, and not necessarily reflect out of the box, siled functional SaaS processes.
Both have changed their approach to the industry allowing multi-channel accessibility, noting that most users will prefer to access technology through their mobile devices. There is now a focus on creating holistic experience systemswhere personalized services are accessed based on role and individual while residing and using standardized business processes as and when required.
To combat this, ERP vendors need to move into the new era, especially Oracle’s announcement of OracleME earlier this year, which in my view is a direct response to the advancement of pure platform experience vendors. This shows that large ERP vendors are not immune to market forces; in this case, Oracle happened to be the first to respond positively.
Drivers of the #experienceeconomy
The global pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital technology, and while the public sector appears to remain in the dark ages regarding the implementation of back-office systems, those in the commercial private sector who have not accepted or cannot change Fast enough just go out of business, can’t weather the storm.
As the technology industry is constantly paying attention to consumer behavior and needs, the following factors drive continued investment in creating experiences:
• Consumer need for greater user adoption – ‘systems’ should be intuitive and easy to use by default.
• Process simplification – recognizing that many operational business processes are cut across an organization and people do not work in operational silos.
• The constant need for insight – using real-time data analytics to drive experience is key.
The ability to deliver flexible, intuitive, easy-to-use applications that reflect the way people interact and deliver service by creating immersive experiences that are accessible at a specific point in time is continues to attract large investment funds.
Where are we going?
The divide between humans and machines is getting closer as technology advances, particularly in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Therefore, the natural question to ask is, just where is all this leading?
Today looks at technological developments in terms of virtual reality and avatars, and the predicted greater use of Google Glass, what we see is creating a more accessible and immersive experience.
Welcome to the #experienceeconomy… it’s not going away, folks!
Mark Sweeny, founder, de Novo Solutions