Saturday 31 October 2015

Oracle Open World 2015 - wrapping up with a UX tour

Oracle HQ at the Redwood Shores Campus
The last two days of Open World were as packed as the earlier part of the week and although some conference delegates were already leaving by Thursday morning, sessions continued throughout the day. 

I didn't attend any of the sessions on Thursday because I'd scheduled to go on a tour of the Usability Lab at Oracle's Redwood Shores HQ instead. 

The HQ offices are familiar to almost everyone who works with Oracle products, not least because they're designed to look like the symbol for a database, though, even if visitors don't notice that geeky in-joke, the buildings are still very impressive. 

On the tour we were shown some of the latest mobile apps developments and were given a chance to try them out for ourselves. We also saw a demonstration of eye tracking software used to test Oracle applications before release.
The Usability Lab at Oracle HQ
One of our party was asked to run through some questions about an Oracle application displayed on a screen in front of him. The software measured where his eyes landed on the page and how long it took him to find the information requested. When he was done, a heat map of his eye movements was displayed. This information is used to help inform Oracle about the usability of its new applications. It's good to know that such focus is being placed on the user experience (UX); something that traditional ERP systems are not known for. This, combined with the integrated just in time learning system 
announced at Open World earlier in the week, will, I'm sure, be welcome news to all users of Oracle applications

We had a bit of fun in the lab too with some futures that aren't in any products yet (as far as I know), including an EEG headset that allowed us to use brainwaves to control the movement of a ball through a maze. Having tried this for myself I shall eagerly await the brain-computer interface in an upcoming Oracle release.

Oracle users in the UK don't need to wait until Open World 2016 to take part in the design of future products because the Oracle Applications User Experience Team are going to be hosting an onsite UX testing lab for attendees of the UKOUG Apps15 conference in December. See you there!






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