How To Create A Good PLM Dashboard?

March 24, 2010

I came across to some interesting articles related to what in modern language called UX (User Experience). Articles are from UX Magazine. One of them catch specifically my interest with the topic of Dashboard Design. The another one is more generic – Rich Internet Application Screen Design.

I made some write ups reviewing Dashboard article.

Dashboard UI’s is designed to provide rapid contextual information regarding some higher task or goal, to which the majoritythe user’s attention is directed. This stands in high contrast with regular desktop applications, where the UI is (usually) designed to fulfill a specific task or goal in itself.



Navigation across multiple dashboard pages is a tough subject. There are lots of navigation controls available, but most of them are designed for desktop use. Tabs are an oft-used means of navigation, but they’re only useful if there are few of them. More specifically: any more than seven (plus or minus two) are too many. When the amount of tabs reaches that number, thetime needed to locate the desired tab takes too long for comfort.

Dashboard UIs are an interesting subset of interfaces, and there are some considerable differences between dashboards anddesktops. The examples mentioned in this article show that principles that work in regular desktop interfaces don’t necessarily apply to all types of dashboards. As usual, knowledge of your user, her motivations, and her environment is vitalwhen designing helpful dashboard interfaces. of

I think everybody like Dashboards. In my view, an idea of a dashboard came to the software in general and to the PLM specifically as the way to resolve the complexity of user interaction. However, the idea that in the beginning was clean and bright passed through several conversions and a result is not a good as expected.

Multiple PLM Dashboards I’ve in PLM applications are often becoming a place where a huge amount of information is concentrating. Lots of them actually running so after the goal to bring as much as possible information to the display, and it makes Dashboard absolutely un-usable.

My conclusion- in order to make a successful dashboard, you need to know your user. Dashboards cannot be created for multiple types of users and several goals. The single goal and user-oriented scenario is absolutely needed to create a successful one. The general purpose dashboard has no chance to get their original goal – simplicity. Absence of focus on the specific goal does not allow to show only needed information and in the comfort way for understanding (graph, map, gauge, etc.).

I’m very interesting to hear what is your experience in dashboard creation. What are the successful ones and what are those dashboards that failed? I’m looking forward to our discussion.

Best, Oleg

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The Future of PLM User Interface

March 8, 2010

Old, but very interesting blog post by Thomas Otter from Gartner made me think more about the future of PLM user interfaces. The perspective of multiple cockpits from early models of cars and late models of Boeing 747 was accomplished thoughts about the future trends and recommendation related to the enterprise UIs.

I think this post is still very relevant. I personally liked this one:

[...For those delivering enterprise apps, understanding and using the newer technologies is important. They have the potential to make the UI more compelling and more pleasant to use...]

I made quick search in the archive of PLM Think Tank. I found the old post with thoughts about user interface trends that seem to me going more towards “list” orientation. My examples of UIs coming from different places just confirmed, in my view, this trend. SharePoint, iPhone, Twitter, Facebook… This is the short list of apps that present clear flat strategy in UI building.

So, what I see as the future technological options for PLM User Interface? I’d like to outline few below and will be very interested to hear your opinion and thoughts on that.

1. Diversification. In my view, PLM will soon become more diversified. The “one size fits all” approach is going to end, in my view. Single UI Apps are going to die and will be replaced by multiple composite elements that can be arranged in different ways.

2. 3D. This is a continuation of what was done until now around CAD and 3D models. Things that are 3D today will be focusing on how to make downstream PLM apps more visual.

3. List Everything. It seems to me, list becomes the major user abstraction for everything. Used by multiple apps, list is so simple. You can contextually present any type of information.

4. Visualization. Picture worth thousand words. In many cases if you can visualize something by using charts, pipes, maps and many others, we are making our UI simpler. There is still lots of work to do to make it happen.

So, what do you think will happen in the next couple of years with regards to enterprise UIs and specifically to PLM? Will users convince vendors to diversify UI to make it simpler and social? I think, there is very good chance that those dreams will come true. UIs become hot. People are more and more concerned about user experience and PLM need to stay in focus to deliver the best in the class…

What are your thoughts on this?
Best, Oleg

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What Are Your Questions To PLM Virtual Assistant?

February 19, 2010

When somebody is asking me what is the number one PLM software problem, my instant answer is – complexity. Yes, PLM is a dumb complex. I think, discussions about the complexity of PLM are endless. Each time I hear about new PLM product, the first requirement is to make it simple.  There are two major reasons why PLM is complex. They come from opposite sides of PLM business – product related and people related. From the product related standpoint, we need to admit – engineering and manufacturing are a complex discipline. Product complexity is growing, so we are facing growing complexity in design, engineering data and manufacturing. On the other side, from people’s side, engineering nature it to see all problems in the complex way, analyze dependencies, etc. So, engineers are constantly coming with more and more complex requirements. The result is simple – when you operate PLM software, you need to think… And you think to think a lot…

The complexity of applications creates a lot of problems to the people operating this software. However, recently, I started to experiment with personal assistant on my iPhone. Siri (www.siri.com)

Now, let me switch your imagination on. Do you think we can apply this interesting assistant behavior to help me to operate my complex PLM software? Or, in another way, can my PLM experience changed to be as simple as experience with the virtual assistant. I think that it may work. PLM virtual assistant may fit “a role oriented” work PLM products need to do in your organization. What about questions like -

1. What is the most urgent work I need to do today?

2. Who is responsible of the ABC part manufacturing?

3. Where is the last revision of my drawing?

4….

Now it is your turn. I’m sure you can come with much better questions. So, now think about what type of questions you can ask PLM virtual assistant if you have one in your organization? Sounds crazy? However, let’s make a try…I’m waiting for questions you want to ask you PLM virtual assistant.

Best, Oleg

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How do you want to see your PLM start page?

January 14, 2010

I want to raise the following question. How do you want your PLM application to start? I was reading the following article in Mashable and thought it might be an interesting topic to discuss. I’m sure your impression about the product in your everyday life can be different depends on how this application welcome you, and what you can see in the beginning. If you think, many of the applications you really like have clean, simple and attractive welcome behavior. And I’m sure you don’t want to see apps that take time to warm up and brings you lots of unusable information.

So, getting back to PLM, I decided to put some ideas of how potential PLM start behavior can look like.

1. Open. This one is typical for most of the desktop apps. If you are working with CAD system or similar desktop application, this is your way to go. Open what do you need, Go… If you CAD app is connected to sort of the data management tools, you probably have some enhanced version of Open, but same ideas.

2. Status. You probably manage lots of tasks, activities, people, processes. So, dashboard-like a welcome page can help you get oriented in what is going on.

3. To do list. Another variant to concentrate, but mostly on what do you have in your work list for today, this week, this month, this year… If you think in terms of GTD, this is a place for your next action…

So, I’m sure there are more behaviors and ideas. I’m sure, new environment will become more webbish Facebook-like. You are welcome to share your experience and thoughts, as usual.

Best, Oleg

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Things Are Getting Touchy (PLM Tablet User Experience Thoughts)

January 12, 2010

Do we need to kill a mouse? Josh Mings, author and founder at SolidSmack mentioned middle-mouse button wheel as one of the five best CAD related innovations of the last decade.

And I agree with this statement. However, do you like your iPhone? Alternatively, maybe you like your HP TouchSmart? What do you think about future user experience in the world that moving fast to the touch user experience?  Do you think we are going to see a massive shift in user experience with the introduction of touch screen devices and tablets?

At the time that whole world is preparing to the potential coming Apple’s announcement of the new tablet device, I decided to put some thoughts and analyze what potential it can bring to the people in the PLM eco-system.  Before going to analyze, take a look on the following video. Despite the fact, it is related to publishing market, I found it as the closest example to the world of 3D/CAD/PDM/PLM…

So, what do think? I’m sure you figured out some ideas that already had chance to see in CAD user experience, like SolidWorks mouse gestures. If you lately made some experience with 3DVIA Mobile, you can find some associations too.

However, I want to figure out some PLM organizational sweet-spots for such user experience:

1. Sales. What can be better than present something live and handy? The growing interest in iPhone applications is the simplest confirmation. We can see a growing amount of demo iPhone apps presenting content or even mockups of your product, ideas, etc. Be able to do the same with your users, show product look and feel, demonstrate features. I’m sure products like 3DVIA Composer from DS and similar publishing tools can be an ideal target to be presented on tablet devices.

2. Design review. It looks like tablet experience can be a good companion for collaborative work during design reviews and meetings. You don’t like people hiding behind screens of laptops and desktop monitors. It can be very cool to be able to have such a handy device to work on your current presentation.

3. Manufacturing shop-floor mobility. This is another opportunity. To have a mobile device of size bigger than PDA can open additional functions for people in the shop-floor to access different product and manufacturing related information. Operation instructions, documents – this is only the initial list of what can be used.

You can think, these are futuristic examples… Maybe, however, I’m pretty sure, our future will be much more touchy than today. However, the biggest challenge will be PLM applications. Take a look on today’s user experience. I think we are far from ideal and there is a long way towards new user experience and ideas to become real life.

Just my thoughts.
Best, Oleg

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3D Perspectives: How To Create Products for Our Digital Future

November 12, 2009

My new post on 3D PERSPECTIVES.

Picture 47

Best, Oleg

 

 

 

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PLM Plus User Experience Minus Complexity On Demand

November 11, 2009

Few publications around a new company called PLM+, which left stealth mode this week, drove my attention. There is not much information about PLM+ product. You can take a look on Josh Mings post in SolidSmack and Al Dean publication in develop3D as well as research PLMplus web site. So, I did.

PLM+ hit me to think again about second-mover innovation. I had chance to discuss second-movers before in my post “PLM in an economic downturn – Is there a place for second mover innovation?”. Looking on everything, I know about PLM+ for the moment, it makes me perfect sense to innovate in the place where all PLM companies already made their trials and investments. Original born for big companies like Boeing, Toyota and others, Product Lifecycle Management aimed to resolve complex needs of these big OEM’s design and manufacturing processes. Since that time and especially during last 3-5 years, most PLM vendors claimed their SMB-oriented product lines and brands – Siemens PLM Velocity with TeamCenter Express, Dassault PLM Express and various combination of ENOVIA SmarTeam products, Windchill OnDemand from IBM and Windchill Product Point (just released earlier this year). All these products claimed simple, yet powerful product capabilities fully loaded with a set of known PLM buzzwords ready for SMB.

And, of course, I need to talk about Arena Solution (former bom.com). Reading about PLM+ and looking on old materials about PLM products, I found very interesting use case from Arena Solution back in 2002. Unfortunately, web history is pretty clean and even Google wasn’t able to track this publication 7 years backward online, but I have copy of document and would like to share a fragment of this use case below. Take a look – I think it is self-explained.

Picture 44

So, what are my thoughts about PLM+ today? I think, to innovate in the place where all competitors spent a lot of money to research and build their own products is a very interesting approach that fits today’s economy. And, it was successfully done by many other companies in the past. Without going with big examples like AMD vs. Intel, there are many others. I personally liked company called Xobni – think about what possible to invent in email these days? So they did, in my view. For me PLM+ is a very interesting try to achieve “simple” in PLM and, I agree with Josh, saying that it’s very hard to write these two words together anytime. Knowing personally Guy Alroy and Benny Shaviv, I just want to tell them good luck!

Best, Oleg

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Can We Improve Usability of PLM Software?

October 13, 2009

First of all, I’m sorry about such a topic. Yes, Usability! I think we have been talking about usability for last 20 or maybe even more years. Why this is very important today? In my view, we are going to achieve an interesting point of intersection between consumer software and enterprise software. From my standpoint, there are few consumer-oriented or general enterprise software are getting very close to some of the functional capabilities provided by PDM/PLM providers.

1. Management and sharing on documents
2. Messages and Flow
3. Content collaboration

Few interesting blog posts got to my attentions related to the topic of usability in enterprise software. One is Enterprise Software Can NoLonger Remain Unusable. What was very cool is to see a fresh user experience of IFS- nice, and I’d say iPhone like.

One more observation came out of the following post by Scott Monty. I found the following comparison between Apple, Google and Enterprise Software pretty smart and make sense. I’d say PLM (and not only PLM) vendors need to think about that seriously.

apple-productgoogle-productenterprise-product

I will continue with  more posts related to usability. But, what is my conclusion for today? Despite the fact, I see a very significant level of improvement in specific product in the market and some very nice and fresh UIs, on the broad range, change is demanded.

What do you think?
Best, Oleg

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Future PLM User Experience will be flat?

October 5, 2009

I’d like to discuss a user experience topic today. I think, this is a very painful question if we are talking about Enterprise Systems. PLM is not exception and suffering from complicated and not always appropriated user interfaces. I think, indeed, PLM has some advantages on the side of 3D, but in my view, there is a significant portion of non-3D life in PLM too. So, I’d like to pick up “List User Experience” trend. On the positive side, I see power of List in his simplicity. Everything can be represented by the list (except of 3D of course:) ). There are few powerful developments of a list-oriented user interfaces, I want to mention.

Microsoft SharePoint
SharePoint is using a list as a fundamental user interface experience. Everything is represented as a list and everything is transferred to become a list. You can see more details about SharePoint user experience in my previous posts about that – PLM Collaboration, To Catch Wave of Share List?

Micro-bloging and social networks
This is all about Facebook, Twitter, Yammer and other micro-bloging and other similar products.I can see a definite trend in standardizing on list base user interface. Facebook user interface becomes a more “list” compared to what we had before. Products list TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop and other are all lists-based.

Picture 18

Mobile User Experience
There is not much to say about the iPhone User Interface. Everything is list-based. Lots of other products simulate iPhone user experience to get higher customer adoption rate.

Picture 17

Future Twitter Lists.
Some very interesting future development expected from Twitter. Twitter Lists. This new product from Twitter looks like next level of maturity to experiment with what List abstraction can deliver.

So, what is going in Product Lifecycle Management? Everything is pretty structured and not flat today. May this is our chance to change it? I’m looking forward to your comments.

Best, Oleg

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Benefits of RIA for Product Lifecycle Management

September 23, 2009

riaI’d like to discuss RIA today. RIA – Rich Internet Applications are web applications that have most of the characteristics of desktop applications, typically delivered by way of standards based web browser plug-ins or independently via sandboxes or virtual machines. Examples of RIA frameworks include Curl, GWT , Adobe Flash/Adobe Flex/AIR, Java/JavaFX, uniPaaS, Mozilla’s XUL and Microsoft Silverlight.

Thinking about today’s modern technologies such as SOA, SaaS and development of PLM systems I see more and more advantages in complete encapsulation of user experience component from PLM business components. In such context, RIA can provide a good technological foundation to establish great user experience. And, in my view, user experience is one of the key factors for today’s PLM system user adoption.

So, what can be such benefits? I’d like to figure out top three and describe them in details.

1. Better data visualization.

A lot of information in PLM systems can be better understood in a graphical way (in comparison to normal boring web application). Spatial information, geo locations, 3D models, process visualization- this is the only short list of data that can be presented graphically to the user. RIA can be an excellent choice to improve UI in such cases.

2. Integration of data across multiple systems

The nature of PLM is to deal in multiple domains of data - requirements, design, engineering, support, customers. PLM systems today can provide a federated layer to manage information in other systems. However, it creates visualization challenges. Usage of RIA can simplify a way PLM will present information coming from different domains.

3. Mobile Access to Information

The nature of PLM is to deal in multiple domains of data - requirements, design, engineering, support, customers. PLM systems today can provide a federated layer to manage information in other systems. However, it creates visualization challenges. Usage of RIA can simplify a way PLM will present information coming from different domains.Today’s life is very dynamic and customer demand is to be able to access product-related information everywhere. Since RIA can seamlessly make data available on mobile devices, PLM can leverage it and expand PLM system usage and deployment in the organization for many additional tasks.

In addition, PLM deployment is heavily relying on services and customization. This is, in my view, additional reason why RIA is not in mainstream for PLM. RIA development is complicated and not always can be acceptable to service providers. PLM system can gain a significant advantage from the ability to support RIA and provide toolboxes for PLM system customization based on these tools.

Have you made any initial investment in RIA system learning? Do you plan to do it? Do you see any benefits?

Best, Oleg

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