Monday, October 27, 2008

Value of Work Flow

These days it is hard to attract people to your software based on appearance. That isn't to say that appearance isn't important or that people won't make decisions based on appearance. However it is hard to convince someone to try a piece of software if your claims are about appearance, usability, work flow, etc. This is because these terms have been so often misused and everyone will indicate they have superior user experience. The reason I bring this up is I was playing around with the new Change Manager 5.0.1 release and was doing a comparisons so that I could determine the permission difference on a set of tables. Well it didn't work right away. Fortunately I quickly noticed that "Ignore Object Permissions" was selected in the Options selection. After deselecting and re-executing I got the desired result. While I was marvelling over how useful knowing how permissions have changed and how easy it was for me to resolve my issue it dawned on me how little I notice the rest of the setup. From narrowing to tables, though the mapping to finally seeing the result a lot of very exacting refinements were done without really having to think about it. The tool guiding me through a very complex task to results I wanted to see. Anyhow the net result was me thinking, wow that is a great experience we should be telling people about. So as I was seeing the "Great User Experience" headline I signed and realized that would never work. So how do you promote something like work flow?

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