Simplified UI for PAAS 4 SAAS solution - 1

At Profource we have developed a Banking Cloud solution for processing bank statements into Oracle Cloud Financials environments. Although Cloud Financials provide you the mechanisms to upload statements and upload receipts, the transformation of the file into the necessary format required by Cloud Financials and the matching of open invoices to the receipts in the bank statement, is still a manual activity that takes time and so costs. Cases have proofed that Profource makes this process 7,2 times quicker.

Since we at Profource also are running on Fusion ERP Cloud R10, we needed a PAAS 4 SAAS solution for this. We’ve developed our own solution based on Oracle technology (ADF/SOA) and were successfully running this internally and at customer sites.

Last week we were given the unique opportunity to redesign our UI with the UX Development team. In a three day workshop we intensely focused on both design and building the UI using the Rapid Development Kit keeping the simplified UI patterns in mind.

The main focus of the simplified UI patterns is Glance, Scan, Commit.

Glance the page to see what is interesting to dive into deeper, scan more details of what you are interested in and finally execute some specific actions.

During the workshop we broke up in two Agile development teams. The first team focused on designing the UI using a lot of sketching and the wireframe templates made available by the UX Development Team (see http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/ux/applications/index.html for more details).

The UX Development Team was excellent in challenging us to rethink every page we designed. “Why would you need that information here?” “What is it the user is intended to do on this page?” “What would this trigger the user to do?”.

Being a veteran forms developer from origin with OAF experience the switch to ADF (or any MVC focused development tool) also allows you to think much more from outside in (focus on design) than from inside out (focus on code and tables). So while the design team continued developing the designs in an iterative manor, the tech team focused on building the UI using the Rapid Development Kit in ADF. This RDK contains a lot of nice reusable components that make it very easy to incorporate the Simplified UI patterns in your application and also to provide a seamless integration experience with the SAAS application.
It was great having Lancy Silveira on the team, who made everything look so easy and talked us through the RDK to build up our own UI.

Currently we use Integrated Pages in the SAAS application to expose our PAAS solution for our clients, so their user experience is optimized even when the Banking Cloud solution is running in its own cloud environment. The user doesn’t really notice he’s in a different environment, because the UI experience equals that of his SAAS application.

So I like to say many thanks to the UX Development team Ultan O’Broin, Julian Orr and Lancy Silveira for these intense and productive days!

We will be exposing our new UI soon on the Oracle Market Cloud (https://cloud.oracle.com/marketplace/listing/4965517?_afrLoop=518464299776307&_afrWindowMode=0&_afrWindowId=il2g3yt3d_1), so keep an eye on that!