Behind the Oracle user experience goals of designing for simplicity, mobility, and extensibility is a core design philosophy guiding the Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) team’s work in emerging technologies: “Glance, Scan, Commit.”
It nicely boils down a mountain of research and a design experience that shapes the concepts you can see from us.
The philosophy of “Glance, Scan, Commit” permeates all of our work in the Oracle Applications Cloud user experience, especially when investigating emerging technologies.
On your wrist
Some projects fit the “Glance, Scan, Commit” philosophy like a glove. The smaller screens of smartwatches like the Apple Watch and Android Wear watches require the distillation of content to fit.
Consumers demand glance and scan interactions on their wearable devices. The Oracle user experiences provide just the right amount of information on wearable devices and enable the ability to commit to more detail via the accompanying smartphone app.
On your ‘Things’
How else does the OAUX team apply the “Glance, Scan, Commit” design philosophy?
Let’s look at another example: The “Things” in the Internet of Things (IoT) represent a very broad category of Internet-connected devices, and generally speaking, consumers can’t rely on these things to have large screens, or even screens at all. This reduces the experience down to the lightest “glance” of proximity, and in some cases a sonic “glance.”
Sometimes we tap into the user’s context such as micro-location, provided by Bluetooth beacons or Near Field Communications (NFC) tags, to capture a small chunk of information. The “glance” here is the lightest touch of a beacon coming within range or a near field tag brushing up against a sensor.
In some cases, we use the philosophy to build sound “glances,” by capturing chunks of information that are then dictated by a personal assistant, like Amazon Echo. These are simple, small, discrete tasks powered by the human voice and Internet-connected devices.
For the eyes
We are also actively exploring and building visualizations to provide “glance” and “scan” experiences that allow users to consume report data quickly and easily, without poring over tables of information.
Video Storytelling, for example, permits complicated and detailed reports to be animated and delivered via audio and video. Think about the intricacies of a quarterly financial statement; video storytelling does the thinking for you by producing the information in very scannable, organized buckets of audio and video.
The “Glance, Scan, Commit” philosophy becomes even more important when building new experiences. As users are exposed to new experiences, data from the Oracle Applications Cloud provides a constant that helps them embrace these new technologies. Delivering the data in a particular way, using designs shaped by “Glance, Scan, Commit,” increases that consistency.
If the Oracle user experience can provide customers with the information they need to do work every day, in a meaningful way, then new technologies are tools to increase user participation, not barriers.
In the not-so-distant past, “walk up and use” was the bar for experiences, meaning that the interactions should be easy enough to support use without any prior knowledge or training. The user would simply walk up and use it.
The rise of smartphones, ubiquitous connectivity, and IoT — and the emerging technology that enables their use — make our new goal as close to simply “walk up” as possible. Workers can use the system without interacting with it directly, because context collected from phones, combined with smart things around them and enterprise data in the cloud, allow the environment to pass useful information to users without any interactions. This removes more barriers and also works to increase user participation. The more users are engaging with an enterprise system, the more data goes in – and the more value our customers can get out of their investment.
And that, in the end, is the overarching goal of the Oracle user experience.
See it for yourself
If you want to put hands-on what we do, we will be at Oracle OpenWorld participating in the OAUX Cloud Exchange. Attendance requires a non-disclosure agreement, so please register early.
