When you have interactions with products and services you get emotional involved. This is also true when having interactions with Exact and it’s influencing your experience, or better called your  User Experience (UX).

I’ve written about Functions and Features versus the User Experience, Simplicity being the new Gold, the Survival of the Sexiest and the fact that it’s all about the User. All these articles have in common that they are changing the mindset towards more focus for the end user of the products and services. I’ve created a short presentation on the progress to embed the User Experience in everything we do. If you can’t view the presentation below you can find it here.

Focus alone is not enough, it also requires special expertise and of course YOU! The user of our products and services as the main source of information on you emotions and feelings. If you want to participate, fill in a comment below or email at ux@exact.com

Image: ovizo0n

In earlier articles on Features and Functions versus User Experience, Is simplicity the new gold and the Survival of the Sexiest I already referred to changing end user expectations. At Exact we take this very seriously and we do not only want to deliver useful products, but also want to create usable and desirable products. Creating excellent user experiences requires in depth knowledge about the user, their context, their needs and emotions. Therefor it’s essential to get the end users involved in the overall product design process in the form of creative workshops, feedback sessions, user research, surveys and many other involvements.

You the end user can join us shaping the products and services of the future. You will get the opportunity to share your knowledge on various business processes, get early previews and provide feedback on early design studies and even get an opportunity to visit our new head quarters in Delft.

All users, new and loyal, from a wide range of business processes are welcome. However we typically focus only on a few functional areas at the same time and this might mean that you have to be patient with your involvement.

Your call to action:

1. If you are a prospect or customer, leave a comment below if you are interested to participate and mention your field of expertise
2. If you are a partner, create awareness among your customers for this create opportunity
3. If you are an Exact employee, promote this among the customers you work with

If you are too shy or prefer to be less visible don’t hesitate to email me on: aad.hart@exact.com and I will make sure you get in contact with the User Experience team.

We are looking forward to work with you.

Credit: FreeBirD

The web has become an important part of our lives. We use the web to find and share information, to communicate and buy stuff. We are spiders stuck in the World Wide Web. The web lives, every day new sites, services and opportunities emerge. The constant expansion and change also brings challenges and makes it hard to remember who you really are.

How many faces, or in other words usernames and passwords, do you have? I’m pretty sure they are quite a few and are hard to manage. Some of the usernames you could choose yourself while others are provided to you. The passwords all have different rules and you probably have heaps of difficulties to remember them all. This is a common challenge of the web and a solution is complex. There is a standard with OpenID, but adoption is slow and it takes time.

Wouldn’t it be nice if:
1. You identify and authenticate yourself at the portal of your accountant and with a single click you can log into Exact Online without having to enter your credentials again.
2. You could choose your own username and password for the Exact Customer and Partner portals
3. Keep your Exact logon credentials when you change your job from one Exact Partner to another or from a partner to a customer etc.

We will make this all happen for you. Exact Research has been working on an Exact ID that will facilitate the above scenarios and a lot more. In the future we will support OpenID, Microsoft Live ID, Google Account, etc. to authenticate yourself for any of the Exact web applications. This is a major step towards a uniform and transparent web, but dealing with user credentials require extreme care and for this reason we take a very small steps towards the implementation.

Keep a close look at this blog and the portals for more upcoming information.

We are entering a new world with new success factors. Rajesh Patel mentioned, during the Exact Partner Conference, ‘the survival of the sexiest’. It’s not about sophisticated functionality anymore, but it’s about convenience. In earlier articles about Functions & Features versus User Experience and Is Simplicity the new Gold I already wrote about this. It’s a trend that will change the way we look at business automation. Features versus User Experience needs to be balanced very carefully. You can clearly see this in the Featuritis Curve.

We currently make significant investments into knowledge, expertise and research towards improved User Experiences. This is also why we are, and I admit late, working on multi-browser support and a mobile web application for Exact Synergy Enterprise. I’m very interested to learn your emotional experiences with our solutions.

For most business applications the following rules is true: 80% of the users only uses 20% of the functionality. This brings interesting challenges in product design. I already touched this in an earlier article on Functions & Features versus User Experience.

Over the years most products gain more and more powerful features that are often useful for the power user part of the audience, for the rest of the audience these new feature are often considered noise. Customization and personalization are used to address the signal versus noise ratio. Unfortunately this only increases the over all complexity and studies have also shown that personalization is only used by a small group or users.

Companies like Apple and Google have mastered the art of creating simple and powerful products and used this to differentiate from the competition. This is best expressed by Simplicity by Eric Burke. Recently we also see other companies adopting alternative simpler versions of their products. The best examples are Facebook Lite and YouTube Feather. Based on direct customer feedback these companies have recognized that not all users need all the functionality all the time. Especially the more casual user requires a different signal to noise ratio to remain efficient and productive. It’s worth to note that these ‘lite’ versions do not replace the ‘full’ versions but offer an alternative.

At Exact we are also exploring the opportunities that simplicity can bring. You can help by providing feedback and suggestions in the comment section below.

Photo credit: Will Lion

Thank you for investing some of your precious time to read this article. I’m Aad ‘t Hart and have a long history in various R & D roles with Exact. Years ago I was one of the initiators of Exact Synergy and more recently my primary responsibilities are research into the future business applications. This the first article in hopefully a long series of articles were I will share our vision on trends, innovations in business software and how we apply these into our products.

The title of this article ‘Functions & Features versus User Experience’ immediately addresses one of the key challenges of our industry. Based on market and competitive analysis, technology trends, and customer feedback many features are added to the products. This is a natural process in the product life cycle creating products that are wider and deeper in functionality. People who require this added functionality are enthusiastic and it helps them achieving their goals, however for people who don’t need the new functionality it has a negative influence on their user experience.

Every company looks for differentiators in their product and for long the number of Functions & Features was an easy way to measure against the competition. The continues addition of Functions & Features has created an arms race on features and they have lost their capabilities to differentiate, because it’s assumed that the product is rich in Functions & Features. Today the overall User Experience, is the product easy to learn and use, is the user happy and more hard to measure attributes become more important.

This all creates an enormous challenge, because adding Functions & Features for one person makes the product better, while for another person it makes the product harder and more difficult to use. Customer feedback, and we thank you for that, already shows us these conflicting perceptions of new functionality. We constantly do our best to qualify not only the added value of new functionality, but also for which percentage of the people it adds value. We try to optimize adding functionality in such a way that they are beneficial for most people using the product. We combine this with efforts to optimize and improve the experience of existing functionality. This however creates an even bigger challenge, because it requires changes in something that the users have become accustomed to.

We believe we can help you best by creating products that are rich in functionality and offer an excellent user experience. However this will not come without change and disappointments. We appreciate and look forward to your feedback to jointly work on creating these excellent experiences.

Image credit: d’n'c