Context is Still King
By Quinton Wall, Director, Corporate Marketing, Salesforce
I’ve said it before, and I’ll it again, It’s time to move beyond apps that just provide answers, they must now also provide context.
“Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events,” — All the King’s Men author Robert Penn Warren.
Little did he know then that he was writing about good app development. What do I mean? I’m saying many enterprise apps fail because they lack connecting the context of the present event to its relationship to the past and future.
This lack of context isn’t the only reason why enterprise apps fail, to be sure. The reasons are many. Some fail because IT teams are pressed to develop too many apps, too quickly, and the apps fall short of user expectations. Other reasons include change requests tripping up development time and projects fall to the wayside, while developers still have a challenging time developing great user experiences. Mobile surveys consistently find that poor user experience is related to many enterprise app failures.
This is more going on here than designing an elegant yet effective user experience, which is certainly difficult in itself. It’s also about delivering the right data based on proper context into the hands of users. Context that is based on the situation they find themselves.
A simple example would be an onsite sales call. Before the call, a financial advisor would certainly want to see the customer record, but what could be the context around the customer that could be highlighted so that the advisor may gain clear insight? Perhaps it’s that the customer has three children, with two of them approaching college age. And it would be a great idea to review the state of savings plans for those children. That’s giving people the information they need to not only increase sales, but also help customers in meaningful ways.
The question for development teams is then, how to take the data about the customer that is available and then provide that salesperson, customer service rep, or other user the data available on the customer, and then provide the customer with something with a service or the product that is relevant, interesting, and actionable. Actionable so that the relationship with the customer is strengthened, and the customer also gets more out of their relationship with us as their vendor. This is the power of context.
Such context isn’t just for customer-facing situations, line of business managers also want to be able to see, in real time, what’s happening in their business. And they want to be able to digest it. This also requires access to the right data and that data be displayed in a comprehensive, yet informative way. Unfortunately, such reports have typically been something that has been given to managers daily perhaps, weekly, or even more ordinarily, monthly. They get their spreadsheet, and it tells them something, but they’ve got to dig into it to find anything of value. Maybe, if they are lucky, they’ve an analytics layer that helps make the data pop.
Unfortunately, more often than not, the worker doesn’t have the ability to customize their analytics layer, so they can’t slice the data the way that they want. This is one of the reasons why people are starting to ask for dashboards. They want to be able to check their dashboards on their laptop or a mobile device, and they want to see that information presented in a way that’s appropriate to them and their job. If they’re a sales manager, they want to see the data flowing in from the productivity of their salespeople. They want to be able to understand quickly, who is performing, or who they may need to spend some time with training.
That same kind of context can be applied elsewhere. Another example of context would be location. Employees, as they land in a city, can be provided an agenda of activities and visits that would make great use of their time. What prospects are available and other potential customers to meet and network?
These are the types of challenges that customers want to solve.
Enterprises want to be able to use the right data at the right time in front of the right people. So how is that data liberated? How do we effectively apply a layer of cloud services over the top of these legacy systems and capture and present this data?
You can rest assured that the user wants it easy. The user doesn’t want to have to log in to SAP to go and put in a resource request or a purchase order requisition. They don’t want to have to know which system their requests are flowing into. They ultimately don’t even want to know who has to approve it. They just want to be able to say, in order to do their job that they need to clear this requisition.
That leaves companies with the challenge of bridging these systems and providing updates back to the system of record and take data out and present it in a much more usable fashion. The challenge with this is integrating multiple systems at speed.And also making sure that any of the applications that we’re building can easily talk to those old systems of record and update them as well.
But none of that matters if users don’t enjoy using the app. If the app isn’t enjoyable, it will be used at the bare minimum, if at all. Creating an experience that users look forward to is the vision for all developers. We have to make sure that we aren’t creating just acceptable ways to work, but that they’re enjoyable ways to work. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an end customer or whether it’s an internal employee. And what I think the minimum bar is for a good level of user experience is something that feels naturally comfortable. It isn’t forcing them to stop and think about how to do something, it’s about providing that context. Yet, it still has to be simple, intuitive steps, just like we all see in consumer grade applications. That’s the bare minimum. The next level that we should be shooting for is to make something actually enjoyable andrelevant to the moment. Connect this work event so that it is in context to past, and future, events.
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This article was original posted on LinkedIn.
