I often read user surveys on corporate software products and see usability ranked fourth or fifth as a selection criterion for these products. Is it any wonder then that corporate software still remains difficult to learn and use even as consumer hardware and software products are undergoing a major revolution in usability?
If you compare today’s phones, consumer oriented websites, and other technology products with those from just five years ago, you will notice remarkable leaps in the overall user experience. On the other hand, most business software products look like they were designed around early 1990s or before. It is not uncommon to have to go through bulky user manuals and weeks long training before these products can be used.
While researching data integration products recently, I found that many of these products were difficult to use and required significant learning curve to get started. Some of the products I came across had over 200+ buttons visible on the screen!
I believe that benefits of superior usability are generally understated and underestimated. A well designed product improves productivity in ways small and large. An intuitive product seems familiar even to a new user. In most cases, you just know how to use it. For companies where job functions are frequently distributed between business users and IT staff primarily because business users do not have expertise in certain tools, a well-designed product can blur those lines by enabling business users to perform these tasks directly.
At Astera, we put great deal of emphasis on making our products easy to learn and use. Our goal is to build data conversion and data integration products that can be used by business experts while providing all the hooks and features required for serious development. With “Hermes”, the upcoming Centerprise version, we have preserved the same intuitive, clutter-free user interface while adding a great deal of power.
For instance, dataflow and workflow designers support cut, copy, paste, unlimited undo/redo, dynamic creation of layouts, global replacement for database connections and file paths, and numerous other usability features that are notably absent from other data integration products.
Other notable features are one click WYSIWYG instant preview and Quick Profile. Data Preview and Quick Profile are invaluable debugging aids that speed up your development and testing.
Tags: astera, Astera Software, centerprise, Data Conversion, data integration, data mapping, data migration, data transformation, Data Warehousing, ETL