The Hindu Business Line : Business-centric designs `improve' efficiency

While consumer product manufacturers have been discussing the former over coffee tables for years now, the business process-centric design of software for enterprises comes as an opposite and radical thought.

"In business process centric design, the focus is on the organisation's business practices, and how to make it more efficient - the user is given a holistic view of the procedure to follow. This can increase productivity for companies by 100-200 per cent," explained Mr Pradeep Henry, Director, Cognizant Technology Solutions India, speaking on the sidelines of an annual national conference on Advanced User Interface Practices held in the city.

The IT services firm has pioneered the business process centric approach. The firm has spent 80-100 hours training a team of 40 usability engineers on business needs, updating them on trends and research. The company has had 398 user interface (UI) projects till now.

Clients in healthcare, manufacturing, logistics and insurance have seen gains from this business-centric approach. Mr Henry expounded on the theory, "This is different from user-centric design, where the software is made more friendly and personalised to who is using it, so it fits in with the user's way of working."

Agreeing, Mr Surya Vanka, Manager, User Experience Excellence, added, "Before, UI meant a preoccupation with pixels. Designers were called pixel pushers - those who would tweak the presentation layer. Now, we need to understand how people use it, what is the experience. We need to move from the edge to the centre. The experience has to be given priority."

So human experts in multinational IT firms are now working on ways to take a commodity product, build it into an experience - rich, multi-sensory - till the real product itself becomes incidental.

Transparency and context of use is becoming important in the age of Web 2.0, said Ms Sarah Bloomer, a consultant on usability. "Users are also expecting simpler products now. Many are worried about the attitude of users today - as they say, changing vendors is just a click away," she added.