Tuesday, October 31, 2017

UniPhi 13 - 3 days to release!

As per our newsletter yesterday, we have 3 more days to go before we go live with the biggest UniPhi software release in 13 years!

The release date was postponed in June when it was decided that the interface was becoming our biggest weakness and inhibiting our goal of building business software people want to use. It is a common lesson learnt at all management conferences that IT software roll-outs fail because of a lack of senior management support. We felt the best way to mitigate this risk was to build software people want to use. That way, even if senior management are not sold on the idea, the project will succeed as the key stakeholders are the end users who populate it with data. Give them benefits to doing so and surely a good result will ensue. So, this new release is focused on building an interface that encourages use and rewards effort.

We have engaged our user base over the past 3 months to assist us in designing the new interface. Participation was excellent and we really appreciate all the feedback. Yesterday, via our newsletter distribution list, we announced the first set of results from our user survey. 

Today I'll be announcing the second result. This was around colour schemes and has a background story to it. Our existing system (designed 14 years ago) has a save icon that can often get lost. The new interface has reduced the number of icons by replacing the top nav bar of the current system with the current sub nav and thereby bringing in a sub-nav for the current sub nav....that's a lot of sub nav. What this means is that a "button" will never be used as a navigational function in the new release. It will be provide action functions like saving, moving, editing and updating. This means a lot less buttons.
New top nav and sub nav for costs

Secondly, the add and save buttons needed to be accentuated from the other less used action buttons like move or assign to. So we sent out a survey asking what colour the save icon should be and the winner by an overwhelming 90% of respondents was green. I'm sure my 3 year old son will like this as "green means go" and boy does he go!

New action buttons with a green save
Please revisit our blog tomorrow to see the next survey result.