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I just completed another great training session held by the Oracle User Experience (UX) team. I am privileged to be part of the Oracle Fusion User Experience Advocates team, so Oracle is putting a lot of effort into teaching us about Fusion UX.

One of the topics was the new Financials demo that we learned to give. So now, I can play the part of accounting manager at Vision Operations…

While the General Accounting Dashboard is nice, the really mind-blowing part of the Financials part of Fusion apps is the way it uses the ADF desktop integration features. This means that you can seamlessly download your journal into Excel on your desktop, work with the data and then upload it back into your ERP system. As I know business people, they’re gonna love this!

If you want to see what the financials part of Fusion Applications look like, feel free to send me a mail.

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As part of the “Fusion UX Advocates” team, I visited the Oracle Applications User Experience team this week and had the opportunity to play with a real, running Oracle Fusion Application installation. And I can tell you:

• It’s real

• It’s good
• It looks cool
• It’s like no enterprise application you have ever seen before.

But once Fusion Applications hits the street, it will set the standard for all enterprise applications from now on.

There are two ways to build applications: Based on product (data) or based on process. And up until now, we have had to build applications based on data, because that was all our tools allowed. An accounting system has a table of invoices, so our application had a screen for handling invoices. And when an accountant had to decide whether to approve an invoice, he would have to go to several other screens, based on other tables, to gather the information he needed to make a decision.

But with the ADF components, Oracle has been able to build an application based on the actual work process, providing all the information the accountant needs to make a decision on one screen.

The usability revolution has finally caught up with enterprise applications; they will no longer be built based on the capabilities of the database, but on the needs of users.

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Oracle Fusion Applications!

It’s been “announced” at OpenWorld 2009 and again in 2010, and we have seen demos and screenshots - now is the time for Oracle to deliver. I want to see real-life Oracle Fusion Applications installations, so we can really have a look at how Oracle is building a serious enterprise application with ADF - I’m sure there are lessons to learn.

Additionally, I would really like Oracle to offer a “Fusion Applications Services” license - just the engine, not the UI. That would allow me to use the rock-solid data model and services, but put together a custom application on top. If the engine license was reasonably priced, we Oracle partners could start breaking into the middle market with vertical solutions to compete with SAP. But Oracle is very much an enterprise software company selling big bundles to big companies, so I’m not holding my breath…

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I’m watching a builder working on the roof of the office next door. This morning he hauled up a big batch of insulation material, and now he’s putting down the last insulation batt. He has none left over and he’s not missing any. He had exactly the right number. Why? Because he didn’t guess how big the roof was, he measured.

As technologies mature, measurements take over from guesswork. It’s happened in database tuning where most people now measure before they start wildly changing database parameters. It’s happening right now in ADF applications (as I presented on at OpenWorld). And it’s happening in user interface design.

How do you measure a user interface? One way of doing this is using eye tracking. When I recently visted the Oracle Applications User Experience team, I had a chance to try out their eye tracker. It looks like a normal screen, but is has a little panel below the screen that tracks my eyes and produces images like this:

The top image shows a “heat map” providing an overview of the total time all users spent looking at different areas of the picture while the bottom image show a detailed eye track from one user, with each fixation point numbered.

Looking at the Oracle Fusion Applications screenshots, you can see that they don’t look much like typical ERP systems. That’s because Oracle has started measuring actual user experience and building applications to match the way people work.

Are you measuring user experience? You don’t need an eye tracking device - but you need to build UI prototypes and test them on actual users

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