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3 Tech Must Dos For A Smoother User Experience

How important is user experience (UX) in the digital economy?

Building satisfying online brand interactions is far and away the most important task facing CMOs, according to Gartner. Companies that excel convert sales at a rate 2.5 times greater than those that are less skilled.

Those findings make UX a critical differentiator, one that has moved far beyond its roots in visual design. UX must now permeate your technology stack.

“The emphasis on the digital user experience extends UX design well beyond traditional elements like user interfaces,” says Ultan O’Broin, director of Oracle Applications User Experience in EMEA. “Components that support seamless interactivity, such as platform as a service, are now integral to UX, offering benefits to a range of enterprise stakeholders.”

Here’s why. PaaS serves as the conduit for seamless UX between applications based on web services and application programming interfaces (APIs), which are sets of programming instructions and standards used to share data among different web applications. “APIs are as important as user interface icons in the UX toolkit when it comes to graceful connectivity between applications in the cloud,” O’Broin says. “PaaS is what stitches everything together to quickly deliver that interactive experience across any devices.”

Moreover, UX integrated into PaaS helps developers build the kind of consistent and easy interaction so vital to digital branding.

“One of the simplest things people want is intimacy with applications,” says Debra Lilley, vice president of cloud services at Certus Solutions, a London-based Oracle partner. “It’s important across the board, whether it’s a consumer or enterprise app.”

How do you evaluate PaaS in terms of its ability to support strong UX? Look at it based on three important tenets:

1. User-centricity. In the old days, the IT department assumed that it knew what a user wanted from an application. IT developed the application, and tossed it over the wall.

UX focuses on how people actually work and interact with technology to improve application usability. Oracle PaaS provides development kits that integrate those ideas and methods. For example, SaaS developers can use a feature in Oracle Applications Cloud called a rapid application development kit to access templates based on UX design patterns, and deploy custom cloud applications. “It allows developers to personalize apps to a specific business usage,” Lilley says.

For example, she recently worked with a financial group to bring visual cues for certain account information to the front page of the app, because that’s how that particular organization works. “Making the app easier for that specific group to connect with tends to increases usage and user engagement,” Lilley says.

2. Simplicity. Embedding UX design patterns within PaaS development kits simplifies things for developers.

“It hides a lot of the background complexity and makes it easy for them to use,” O’Broin says. “Our job is to ensure that developers can deliver a predictable, consistent, and proven UX, so we give them the templates and components that result in a modern and compelling UX without having to go out of their way. If you bake UX into the development process and tools, they will use it.”

3. Consistency. A PaaS framework that integrates the same UX across apps and services lets companies implement a consistent look and feel. For example, built-in UX makes it easy for Lilley’s team to build extensions to existing apps that flawlessly replicate the UX of the original, she says. “Having the shared components of a PaaS framework all use the same UX is very powerful,” she says. “We can add functionality to an app, and end users don’t have to know they’ve technically left the application and come back, which is key to me. The end users should not be able to see the joins.”

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