1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:08,000 Well, here we are at Max 2010 to hear about some people doing enterprise RIA and engagement, 2 00:00:08,000 --> 00:00:12,000 and exciting stuff in the business world that doesn't involve just streaming videos. 3 00:00:12,000 --> 00:00:14,000 Why don't you introduce yourself real quick? 4 00:00:14,000 --> 00:00:17,000 We'll do that. I'm Chris Rogers. I work with Universal Mind. 5 00:00:17,000 --> 00:00:21,000 I'm our VP of consulting, which means I manage our core business, 6 00:00:21,000 --> 00:00:27,000 which is working with customers primarily in the enterprise and in the innovation space around RIA. 7 00:00:27,000 --> 00:00:32,000 We were talking with Adobe's Ben Watson about what it means to sort of be an enterprise RIA 8 00:00:32,000 --> 00:00:36,000 or to fit kind of the Adobe experience into a business context. 9 00:00:36,000 --> 00:00:43,000 And what's interesting about you guys is you actually go out and do the hard work of doing that with the tools they provide and others. 10 00:00:43,000 --> 00:00:49,000 What's interesting in that aspect is that people seem, a lot of software projects are kind of dismissive of actually, 11 00:00:49,000 --> 00:00:54,000 this is going to sound corny, but studying what their users actually want and how they interact with their software. 12 00:00:54,000 --> 00:01:00,000 And how do you sort of convince people that they should take the time to actually figure out how their users are using the software 13 00:01:00,000 --> 00:01:05,000 versus just kind of satisfy a list of features that they should put into the software? 14 00:01:05,000 --> 00:01:08,000 Yeah, so I'll give you an equally geeky response, which is, you know, 15 00:01:08,000 --> 00:01:12,000 we used to begin our user experience exercises with a discrete research phase. 16 00:01:12,000 --> 00:01:17,000 And if customers aren't sort of convinced that that's needed, often they, or clients I should say, 17 00:01:17,000 --> 00:01:20,000 clients feel like they know their customers really well. 18 00:01:20,000 --> 00:01:25,000 We've baked into more of an iterative design approach. 19 00:01:25,000 --> 00:01:30,000 So in short sprints we go all the way through concepts of user research through prototyping, 20 00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:35,000 which is something a customer does understand in the user experience design sort of world. 21 00:01:35,000 --> 00:01:39,000 So we sort of snuck it in by making sure that we do it in an iterative fashion. 22 00:01:39,000 --> 00:01:47,000 And we can go from user research, understanding users, to wire framing and prototyping up those experiences. 23 00:01:47,000 --> 00:01:50,000 So very often customers get to see what's happening and why that's important. 24 00:01:50,000 --> 00:01:55,000 So it's a bit of an education process, but as long as they're getting out of it at the end of these brief sprints, 25 00:01:55,000 --> 00:02:00,000 what they're looking for, they seem to get more bought in and it becomes more part of the process with that client. 26 00:02:00,000 --> 00:02:04,000 So there's a couple of different ways that this works. 27 00:02:04,000 --> 00:02:07,000 In some senses an enterprise RIA can refer to something that's, you know, 28 00:02:07,000 --> 00:02:13,000 within the four walls of an enterprise and is used for a customer to, you know, interact in business transactions. 29 00:02:13,000 --> 00:02:15,000 So there's a finite user group. 30 00:02:15,000 --> 00:02:20,000 And for us that's an easier way to interview folks, understand personas, 31 00:02:20,000 --> 00:02:23,000 and understand their sort of interactions and workflows. 32 00:02:23,000 --> 00:02:28,000 Enterprise might also refer to applications that are business focused, 33 00:02:28,000 --> 00:02:32,000 like something like a banking application, even though the target user is a consumer. 34 00:02:32,000 --> 00:02:38,000 That's sort of an undefinable user group because it could be anyone who banks and that's sort of all of us. 35 00:02:38,000 --> 00:02:43,000 And again, a lot of what you're getting at is figuring out the touch points the user's having with the software 36 00:02:43,000 --> 00:02:46,000 and then really polishing the crap out of those touch points. 37 00:02:46,000 --> 00:02:48,000 Well, there may be software and there may not be. 38 00:02:48,000 --> 00:02:51,000 There will be software once we're done with them. 39 00:02:51,000 --> 00:02:57,000 But in some cases it might be a process that already exists in another fashion. 40 00:02:57,000 --> 00:03:05,000 So it might be interacting with multiple applications or physical things like calculators and calendars that are hanging on their wall. 41 00:03:05,000 --> 00:03:12,000 There's one example where we worked with a financial services company where we went into a user's cubicle 42 00:03:12,000 --> 00:03:17,000 and found post-it notes and calculators and calendars hanging around on the wall. 43 00:03:17,000 --> 00:03:24,000 And we found out that those were just crutches that they were using in addition to the technology that they had in-house that they thought was just fine. 44 00:03:24,000 --> 00:03:29,000 By integrating a lot of sort of the crutches that they use in their day-to-day process into the application, 45 00:03:29,000 --> 00:03:34,000 we sort of made a much more relevant and usable application for that customer. 46 00:03:34,000 --> 00:03:40,000 So a great user experience doesn't have to be flashy and full of animation and sexy choreography. 47 00:03:40,000 --> 00:03:50,000 A great user experience means that the process is accomplished in as few steps and as elegantly and obviously as possible in most cases. 48 00:03:50,000 --> 00:04:02,000 So where a visual metaphor is more important with something like potentially like a mapping application or something where you want to see the where and the when of the information and the data, 49 00:04:02,000 --> 00:04:11,000 I think we can go down that path. But user experience for the sake of Sizzle is really not the end game in enterprise software. 50 00:04:11,000 --> 00:04:21,000 I think the Adobe toolset, things like Flex and Lifecycle Data Services, etc., these are enterprise-grade platforms that not only foster that user experience, 51 00:04:21,000 --> 00:04:27,000 but the IT professional on the back end understands and is not afraid of and can tie into existing data services. 52 00:04:27,000 --> 00:04:37,000 When you sort of deliver this project or these kind of projects, what's the sort of leave behind you leave for management or whoever to kind of rate the success of it? 53 00:04:37,000 --> 00:04:41,000 How do you get the project done and know to be happy with it? 54 00:04:41,000 --> 00:04:49,000 There's kind of a couple answers here. One is if a customer is getting into sort of a crowded space and wants to enter that space and differentiate by innovating, 55 00:04:49,000 --> 00:04:57,000 then the answer to that is, you know, have we built something that takes them one step ahead of where their competitors are? 56 00:04:57,000 --> 00:05:04,000 So an example of that is working with, for instance, Kodak Gallery, who self-admittedly kind of got behind the shutter flies and snap fishes of the world. 57 00:05:04,000 --> 00:05:13,000 When we help them to build in innovative features and an innovative experience into the new website, you know, they can go off and then measure, you know, 58 00:05:13,000 --> 00:05:21,000 are they having, you know, greater use of the features that are featured on the website and are they getting better adoption, things like that. 59 00:05:21,000 --> 00:05:27,000 On the other hand, if it's more of an enterprise focused application where market share and things like that aren't as important, 60 00:05:27,000 --> 00:05:42,000 you know, we sort of leave it to are the customers using our customers' users getting more out of the data and using the existing enterprise applications in ways that they probably were afraid of doing before. 61 00:05:42,000 --> 00:05:50,000 Admittedly, we don't do so much of that measurement. You know, there's been a lot of discussion here around Omniture and some of the analytics tools that Adobe offers. 62 00:05:50,000 --> 00:05:57,000 And it's probably something we could do, but really we're in the business of making sure that we translate what a customer is, 63 00:05:57,000 --> 00:06:04,000 either a problem that they're trying to fix or a strategic objective that they're trying to realize and making sure that at the end of the project we've done that. 64 00:06:04,000 --> 00:06:05,000 Well, thanks for being on. 65 00:06:05,000 --> 00:06:06,000 Thank you for having me.