2. Panel: Tailoring Your
Applications User
Experiences in the Cloud
Panel Chair: Killian Evers, Senior Director,
Tim Dubois, Architect, Ultan O’Broin, Director,
Applications User Experience, and
Floyd Teter, Executive Vice President,
Product Development, EiSTechnologies
8. Oracle’s Family of Composers
Desktop UI
• Create/Modify Business
Objects, Pages, Security…
Page
• Add new fields to UI
CRM
• Change Labels
ApplicationLeveragesComposer
Everywhere
Composer and Sandboxing
MDS
• Integrated with all
composers
Technology, Browser
• Graphical Editor to
Manage Business
Processes
• Web Based Process
Orchestration
• Available with CRM App
Comp
• Personalize / Customize
page layouts
• Add, remove, hide/ show
components
• Change for a user, group
or everyone
• Implicit/ Explicit
Personalization
Based, No
Business
Coding, Upgrade
Process
Friendly Reports
Composer
Composer
• Create/Modify Analyses
or Dashboards
• Add anything you can
access via a browser
• Available with OBIEE
If you want to….1. Take what you are given out of the box and tweak it, whether it’s public cloud or private cloud, use the suite of Fusion Middleware composers.To you want to quickly go in and do some easy tweaks and we have tools for that for the BA.2.Build a custom app, build a custom integration, then use our UX Design Patterns and Jdeveloper, PaaS.
Now let’s discuss the top 10 things you can do now with the Desktop UI using Fusion Applications composers. Please note that this is not a definitive list of all of the things you can do. Indeed, there are so many that we are only targeting a subset of functionality within a few composers, namely Page Composer, Process Composer, PRJ Custom Objects, and a bit of CRM App Composer. Supporting these Composers are Sandboxes, Manage Customizations, Customization Set Migration, etc.
Suite of composers to empower the business administrator. Application Composer (Available in CRM) - Provides the functional extension capabilities to the admin. Its use case driven where a customer can focus on providing a solution for their customer. It’s the hub for the additional composers in the suite in that it generates all the objects you may use another composer to augment. CRM App Composer lets you create/modify business objects, security, relationships, etc. Add new fields, change labels everywhere… Process Composer – Grid, Pallete BPMN editor for configuring approvals. Drag and drop environment for customer to configure approvals for custom and standard objects. A web based graphical editor to manage your business processes. Page Composer – Component and layout editing tool. It allows for hiding, showing, making required or Read Only, and moving components on pages for single user or groups of users.
Now let’s discuss the top 10 things you can do now with the Simplified UI using Fusion Applications composers. Please note that this is not a definitive list of all of the things you can do. Indeed, there are so many that we are only targeting a subset of functionality within a few composers, namely Page Composer, and a bit of CRM App Composer. Supporting these Composers are Sandboxes, Manage Customizations, Customization Set Migration, etc.Demo:Change the Logo, App Name, Watermark: Go to Settings UI and show how to change these.Change Theme: Settings UIChange icon styles: Settings UIModify the Announcement: Settings UIChange the field labels once: Create a Sandbox, Customize Page, then change the Page LabelReorder fields in HCM Team Compensation.
What I want to cover today is our story about user experience design patterns: the building blocks of Oracle Fusion Applications User Experience. We used these blueprints to effortlessly bring life to the new standard of enterprise applications.You’ll learn how Apps-UX research and design expertise creates these blueprints for building that modern and compelling user experience for applications, what these patterns mean for Oracle, for apps users, and for customer and partner development teams designing and tailoring Fusion and other Oracle apps too. I’ll also tell you where our UX design pattern roadmap is taking all of us.I will explain what UX design patterns are and how you can get your hands on these great resources and how you can use them in your development toolkits. We are now sharing our UX design patterns and other guidance with you so you don’t have to think too hard when designing great-looking usable Fusion apps and the users of those apps won’t have to think at all when using them! This is about developer productivity with Oracle ADF and the Oracle toolkit in the cloud!
I could tell you a story about Christopher Alexander’s famous book (A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, 1977) about design patterns originating in the world of architecture and how the approach became accepted by software developers, but let’s just say you may be sitting on the implementation of such a design pattern (your chair)! The idea of design patterns is not new. You will already be familiar with design patterns for software architecture and how they provide software developers with Java, OOP, integrations, and other technical architecture or framework solutions. Now, we are talking about User Experience design patterns, developers might even refer to them as functional UI design patterns. We’ll call them UX design patterns.On the internet,you come across UX design patterns every day; helping you make sense of your virtual world in easily understandable, memorable ways: The amazon.com shopping cart that permitsyou to add items before creating an account and or browse comparisons, the Google autocomplete or point location maps patterns, …. or these examples from iTunes when searching for an buying music online ….
In the world of mobile apps, we use design patterns too. Hipmunk’s heatmap analytics for selecting hotels in an area of Amsterdam that appeals to us, or the pull down and release to refresh data gesture on the Twitter app, or the pull and release to create on the Clear app for example. All design patterns.The point of all these cool interactions is that none of them happened by accident. Somebody researched and designed how to make apps easy to use in different ways, and then documented the solution to the problem as a design pattern and made it available to others to implement and users to enjoy. Well, we (Applications UX are that somebody for you).We use UX design patterns all the time without evening thinking about that. And that is the whole idea! We’ve done the thinking so that developers don’t have to. Developer’s love the usability book Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. We don’t want users to stop and think before doing something with our apps, but just how much thinking do you think Steve Krug did when writing this book?!
Here’s the process we use for developing UX design patterns for apps. The patterns leverage the best UX practices (and people!) from our applications portfolio, our insight into the Oracle Fusion Middleware and the rest of our tool kit, reflect the best in consumer usability from Amazon, Google, Apple and so more. They’re scientifically tested in our labs, in offices and on the streets by real users doing real tasks. The result: high impact applications user experience patterns with proven usability, built in, so you don’t have to do any of the proving!Over 200 Fusion Application design patterns have been developed for desktop, mobile, BI and other applications and delivered as a library (or website) for developers. And the best part is now that website is available to customer and partner developers too! Free! So, if you are going to design or tailor a Fusion application, these patterns increase existing developer’s productivity with our toolkit, save you project time and money, decrease user training and support needs, and secure the usability of your implementation for users by scoring high on the satisfaction and productivity scales! Patterns enhance our OOTB (Out of the Box)usability, and take it to the next level, reflecting each customer’s requirements.Anecdote: What did Oracle acquire? Click model, navigation design, choice list, search, and other proven interactions and designs. And some great usability people too!
Design patterns are used out of the box by Oracle to design a new standard in enterprise applications user experience: Oracle Fusion Applications. We (Oracle)use design patterns to build the underlying applications information architecture, all core tasks and interactions across the suite, but also specific task and object activities on the page For example, look at how different levels of information are disclosed to an HR manager reviewing the performance of an employees, first as a hover text on the icon, and then as a dialog box. Our research and testing of real users doing real work told us that HR managers didn’t want to overwhelmed by information and needed to disclose different levels of detail as needed, reflecting how they worked. The result was a scientifically proven detail on demand user experience pattern that enabled us to provide such insight provided on the same page, enabling the manger to easily take action based on the information. Developers apply the pattern to the use case that suits.And for accounting managers, our research showed that sometimes they do need to be reminded of just what that key accounting flexfield means. So the icon on that account enables them to see such detail with just a click. No more post-its! We’ll explore such detail on demand patterns more and how developers can uptake them in different ways, shortly.
For developers, patterns mean real productivity when building applications. Firstly, the UX pattern can be applied to a wireframed design or drawing, shortcutting the effort needed to come up with a pre-tested usability solution that everyone can agree on before coding even starts. Then, as they implement the design, developers can take advantage of the functionality of the ADF components that the patterns are based on, but quick wins like layout, consistency, and positioning of widgets too. For example, the applications UI Shell template provides for consistent sense of place and streamlined navigation with its global area, tasks panes and contextual areas; the applications panel component carries work areas for users transactional tasks and enables consistent placing of buttons and headers and footers, and the table component gives users a desktop style, Microsoft Excel-like way to enter, view and manipulate data, and so on. Oracle’s done the research and testing work on UX design patterns so customers and partners and the development community doesn’t have to! With this investment now in your hands you’re on the road to productively developing a modern and compelling UI for your apps. If you’re an ADF developer, well now you can easily give users so much more than functionality, but a proven high standard in user experience too.
An example of an integration done using patterns as it comes to life in ADF. Using the ADF shell means productivity for developers with readability, consistency, positions of headers, footers, buttons, and the rest already coming for free. Baked-in. This is Fusion CRM Simplified UI integrating with a Quote configuration app in the cloud. Partners take note!
Key Takeaway: If you want to find out more about the Oracle user experience, or learn how you can get involved, check our website and blogs.