We are hitting our stride with the 5 critical questions to address with your BPM vendor candidates. Up next: Question #3: “Will the solution provide a suitable user experience for my target audience?”
As noted earlier, creating a positive user experience (UX) within your BPM solution is a critical component of any successful digital transformation effort. A poor user experience will hinder adoption, which then undermines the value of any process improvements being implemented.
On the other hand, delivering a great user experience can help increase adoption rates and drive overall usage, maximizing the value you can realize from your BPM investment.
Again, users will bring certain usability expectations to the table when interacting with any application or system. BPM solutions built on web portal-based platforms make it easier to meet or exceed those user expectations. They allow you to deploy solutions with a modern UI on par with consumer web sites which are visually appealing and intuitive to navigate. And again, if the core product embraces the concept of responsive design, solutions built on it should be accessible from virtually any device. Users expect a similar experience when working on a tablet or smart phone as they do when working from their desktop computer.
Usability is not only a factor for end users – it’s important for process builders and system administrators, too. The more intuitive the tools are for building or updating processes, the less training time is needed for those tasked with maintaining the solution moving forward. Similarly, the more intuitive the UI design is on the front-end, the less training time you’ll need for end-users to spur wide scale adoption. So you’ll want to focus your evaluation on BPM products that support a rich and satisfying UX in order to maximize adoption and value derived from process improvements.
That’s it for this week, but check back next week for: Question #4: “Will the solution be easy to change or expand over time?”