Designing custom business applications can seem daunting, but with Oracle APEX and the right approach, it doesn’t have to be. Redstone’s tips to enhance your APEX development process can help you deliver user-focused solutions that fit seamlessly into existing operations.
Starting with a Human-Centered Design (HCD) as the foundation will heavily influence the screens and flow of an application. From there we can determine the best data, forms, visuals, or content that needs to be displayed. Information architecture is very important in a data driven application. As we narrow down what is on the screens, we also think about visually what that will look like leveraging everything APEX offers out of the box first.
1. Start with Human-Centered Design
What is Human-Centered Design?
Human-centered design is a creative approach to problem solving.
The process of designing with the user in mind starts with the people you are designing for and ends with new solutions that fit their unique needs and wants. Human-centered design is all about building a deep empathy with the people you are designing for. Focus on understanding users, their tasks, pain points, and goals.
Understand Target User Groups/Roles
Every team is made up of people with different roles and responsibilities. Some processes require working with other teams or even outside 3rd party groups. It is important to understand those users and their needs within the application or if our users need to be supported in communicating with those other user groups.
As enterprise businesses move quickly to stay innovative it can be easy to overlook the once a year or more rare interactions like audits. We want to ensure you have the information needed in the appropriate format to make that process as painless as possible.
2. Understand Current Business Operations
Large enterprises already have established processes. The key is to integrate a new application seamlessly into these workflows. A new APEX application is just one cog in a large always moving wheel. To ensure a successful design, we need to consider how the users currently interact with their existing systems along with other employees, teams, and/or customers.
Journey Maps are a great way to easily and quickly understand a process. As a team we define a user group’s task/goal and outline each step needed to accomplish this goal. We note the user’s tasks, pain points, opportunities for improvement, and touchpoints with other individuals or systems. Visualizing each step as a group provides insights and understanding where there may have been silos before.
3. Design with Users in Mind
Once the team has identified where users are most delayed or hindered in their workflow, solutions can be brainstormed to reduce time and friction. Manual tasks were most likely identified, the repetitive tasks that can be automated or streamlined by the custom application. Data can be collected with better validation to keep clean and consistent data.
Oracle APEX is powerful, but only if users can navigate and understand it easily. Simplicity is best to show what is needed for different tasks, specific steps, or restricted user groups.
4. User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
Validating with users can be done at various stages of the project to ensure the application meets real-world needs. Having users get into the application in a lower development environment to click around while sharing their screen will provide more feedback than any email of thoughts. Watching a user navigate can show they quickly moved through a process, or they took the time to click around looking. The team can also see what the user was doing the moment an error occurred.
Ideally there should be a balance between newer users or users that have been working in the current process for many years. A custom application needs to be easy for everyone involved, no matter what your pre-existing experience level is.