A fresh coat of paint can make a huge difference. Look at all the television shows on home improvement networks where houses are bought, cleaned up, and sold for a profit. Nobody wants to buy an old out dated house and the same goes for software applications. Enterprise apps should first provide tangible value to the customer and at a close second we believe they should be easy to use and provide a great user experience. Far too many enterprise apps are clunky, confusing, and have the grey boring enterprise feel.
Everything gets old and outdated and your applications are no different. Unlike a home which can remain in style for 20+ years the world of software applications moves much faster. Geopointe, our most popular app on the AppExchange was released in May of 2010 and by late 2012 it was clear we needed to give it a user interface and user experience upgrade.
Over the course of eight weeks we completely redesigned our app in an effort to make it easier to use and to bring it up to date with a more modern design. You can see the before and after below.
Giving the app a new look and style was only a small piece of the redesign. Unlike creating the design for a net new app this was the redesign of an existing product that already had 1000s of satisfied users. Redesigning an existing app introduces many more challenges as you do not have a fresh canvas to work with. You must take into consideration the way people have been using your app for several years and not introduce any major changes that could disrupt or upset a users experience with the application. To address this we spent a lot of time gathering and interpreting data on how our users interacted with our application. This gave us the knowledge to understand how our users were using our app so we could focus our efforts on the most used features.
Gathering and interpreting app usage was only one small piece of our redesign process and I will be giving a talk at Dreamforce this year discussing all of the steps we took to ensure a smooth redesign and launch of Geopointe. If you wan’t to learn more about what goes into redesigning an enterprise application and the details of our process please check out the session “How to Redesign Your App Without Alienating Your Users” at Dreamforce 2013.
Session Details
Title: How to Redesign Your App Without Alienating Your Users
Presenter: Jason Venable (Director of Application Development)
When: Tuesday, November 19th: 2:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Where: Hilton San Francisco Union Square, Community Success Zone Theater
View in Dreamforce
