Been busy with the hi-fidelity prototype work for the past 3weeks... But the good news is I was able to build a well appreciated and usable Interface for the SaaS based EPM solution.
This articles focuses on the importance of taking a look at the existing system before you start to re-design.
Sometimes as usability professionals we get too high on confidence in the level or expertise we have and fail to look into the importance of why things are done in a certain way (as a usability professional I' sure you would have encountered this situation in the past ). When I started to analyze the existing design I knew it was easy to use but that was only because I had a some sessions with the product experts on how the whole Scorecard creation works. To develop a scorecard in that application the user should have good amount of knowledge in the best practices, different components of a scorecard and how to measure them... while it it is important to know all of this to be able to develop a scorecard, the most important factor the existing design failed to address was, being a SaaS product, where u can sign-up for a free trial and get started right away, it really wasn't intuitive, some very important functionalities which no other EPM SaaS product give where almost unreachable (deep, down, inside)
When I was almost done with the analysis and presented the prototype to team it was accepted very well initially. But as we started to have discussions on various scenarios and how the new design will address it, there I realized a gap in my prototype and how the existing design was able to handle it... Though for a first time user the existing application will look complicated for a user with domain knowledge it would still be a great product.... So I had to revisit my analysis now more from the angle, the existing design is great in terms of functionality and its potential how do i make it intuitive and not try to re-invent the wheel.
Voila! This time I guess I was truly successful. The new prototype was tested for all the scenarios possible and was accepted finally... I'm done with the core modules and have started to work on user management, file management etc., The development teams has started to work on the application when we are ready with the product to go live, I will post it on my blog test it and let me know your comments....
I guess the proverb looks can be deceptive holds good for UI also :)
