Comments on: Ease of Use Outside the Box http://boxesandarrows.com/ease-of-use-outside-the-box/ Boxes and Arrows is devoted to the practice, innovation, and discussion of design; including graphic design, interaction design, information architecture and the design of business. Wed, 15 May 2013 11:41:04 +0000 hourly 1 By: baumr1 http://boxesandarrows.com/ease-of-use-outside-the-box/#comment-6388 baumr1 Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://boxesandarrows.com/ease-of-use-outside-the-box/#comment-6388 Thanks for the story, Mike. It’s amazing how often some of the simple things are made incredibly difficult. With the multitude examples of simple plugins and scripts, we can solve problems that used to take legions of IT workers to resolve. Anyone who has spent time in an enterprise knows exactly what you mean.

For example, take this passage:

> Using your browser’s “favorites/bookmark” functionality can alleviate the problem, but that still places unnecessary burden on the users to bookmark each website and organize them. Even if the websites are bookmarked well, each time the user has to access a website, he must open his bookmarks, browse, find, and click.

Why not set up a special plugin or script that employees can run that creates/updates the bookmarks for them, and even creates a quick way to access them?

In tandem with your URL keyword solution, you could cover mostly any way that the employees want to access the internal apps. That’s the key. The enterprise solutions are often “one size fits all” or whatever is simplest to implement. The multitude of slight pauses in the enterprise worker’s life dealing with internal applications affects not only their productivity, but their job satisfaction as well. If “management” doesn’t care enough to make their administrative life simple, how does that bode for their actual work?

]]> By: rasarasan http://boxesandarrows.com/ease-of-use-outside-the-box/#comment-6389 rasarasan Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://boxesandarrows.com/ease-of-use-outside-the-box/#comment-6389 Thats a great article. I face such multitude of problems all the time in my company. I can add a couple more issues in security.
> Every website I visit within the intranet is secured by password. It demands me to punch in my password before I proceed. But why???
> All the doors are secured and one can enter only when they swipe in. Ok. Understood. But why would anyone want to swipe to go out. Thats ridiculous. And these are flagged. When someone tailgates(people often do so), they are stuck. I find a lot of valuable time spent just swiping, getting stuck, queueing to swipe etc.,

I vouch – there is a lot more to ease of use outside the software itself. Thanks for the article

]]> By: rozzie http://boxesandarrows.com/ease-of-use-outside-the-box/#comment-6390 rozzie Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://boxesandarrows.com/ease-of-use-outside-the-box/#comment-6390 You’ve captured the nightmare of my workday and I’m sure many others. All day long I have to be in and out of two hosted CMS’s, a CRM, a hosted project management/tracking software, two different analytics packages, several vendor “client” sites, a conversion management app, the IT dept.’s helpdesk, etc. I’ve never thought of this usability issue, just the nightmare created by technology and bureaucracies consumed with the analysis of data, which generally seems to lead to little actual strategic decision making; just a lot of head scratching about what to do with all this “good” data we’re accumulating.

As so many of the activities within these systems have more to do with tracking, reporting and data entry than with helping me be productive or think creatively or critically, I’m often seeking easy ways to stay out of them by creating alerts and dashboards. When I’m in them, I find myself wanting to create my own tips and notes and instructions (few systems seem to accommodate this). Maybe therein lies another usability approach to resolving this problem—finding more streamlined ways to create and disseminate the customized information you want from the systems and the customized info you need when you do have to be in them.

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