exotribe

I recently stumbled upon a UI design article published in the November 2004 edition of the SAP Design Guild.  The article, User Interface Patterns - Components for User Interfaces, discusses reusable components, user interface patterns, and mapping UI patterns to user tasks.

The interaction structure consists of discrete areas, known as the focus areas, each of which describes a user activity, such as entering invoice line items. A focus area is defined by its purpose for the user, by other areas to which the user can navigate, and by functions available to the user.

Focus areas are normally derived for one specific business process and are only valid for this. However, the SAP approach requires similar focus areas to be defined from different business processes. Only then can reusable UI components be built that can then be configured for each specific application scenario. One result of this is a consistent user interface structure of different applications that have a similar composition.

The approach of configuring user interfaces with user interface patterns only works if there are a small number of "generic" tasks, which can describe very many different business activities.

The article presents "editing objects" as one of the generic tasks designed for the mySAP CRM solution. Editing objects. This generic task applies to every application I've ever written. Granted, each application had their own set of objects (Service Level Agreements, Call tickets, Station Pricing Policies, Compliance Rules, Gradebook Assignments, etc.) Every application had its own unique way of listing and editing the objects in the system.

However the one thing that really struck me was the entire task definition.

Image from SAP Design Guild

The task identifies several steps: orientation, search and selection, identification, editing attributes, and editing sub-objects.  The task defines each step of the process, and help to identify transitions the UI must go through for the user to complete his task.

I think most developers would consider each step a separate task, and the resulting UI is disconnected.  The transitions between steps are usually ignored, and the result is a clunky, frustrating, inefficient user interface.

Published March 4, 2008

Technorati Tags: UI Design Business Objects