TechLife: Idea Port Riga blog about mobile, web and integration solutions for enterprises

Three months ago, Ideaport hosted a four-episode webinar series entitled "Three initiatives to transform your Siebel CRM in 2021." After the introductory overview webinar, we dived each initiative's details, covering such topics as Siebel Cloud Native Architecture, Siebel - Kafka integration and Siebel UX transformation using Ideaport tools and methods. Ready to access the recordings? They are right here. 

Now it's the time for another webinar series, "Hedging your Siebel career", with three episodes.

While working as Siebel Business Analysts, you have mastered a lot of skills. You are adept at talking to business subject experts and formulating functional requirements. You know end-to-end business processes in your company inside out. You learned to work with Siebel developers and write comprehensive user stories for them. Wonder where you can develop next? What about the Scrum Product Owner certification? Ah, you’ve already got it.

When I first heard of DX4C a year ago, I was dismayed: how come Oracle uses the best Siebel engineering team resources to develop some other product rather than building the stuff Siebel CRM customers require? 

While discussing why Siebel application is often lagging behind its competitors in usability, we came up with three points:

• Missing user-centricity in design
• Limited amount of UI Components
• Lack of UI Design Patterns for complex user-flows

In this article, I would like to familiarize Siebel experts with the main terms, tools, and methods used in the User Experience (UX) domain. To make concepts more tangible, I will explain what UX tools we at Idea Port Riga use during the two-week-long mini-project as we discover Siebel UX improvement opportunities.

For the second year in a row I am leaving San Francisco and Oracle OpenWorld very excited. Last year Oleg and I started to work on the idea, which eventually became the Nexus Bridge for Siebel Open UI. This year I have presented the process for running Siebel UX improvements projects at the Siebel Customers Advisory Board meeting in San Francisco. Nexus Bridge is a crucial technical enabler in Siebel UX projects run by both by Idea Port Riga and several other customers.

This autumn, Idea Port Riga partnered with the Siebelhub team to share our vision about improving Siebel UX with you, the great Siebel community!

While working on this post, we came across the "CRM Technology Value Matrix 2019" by Nucleus Research. Their verdict that "Siebel CRM has the most breadth of capabilities," yet "the product falls behind in usability," perfectly matches our view on Siebel in 2019. 

Siebel UX is not up to date. Siebel Open UI introduction in 2012 made it possible for Siebel customers to change Siebel UI's look & feel by modifying CSS and writing small pieces of jQuery code. By doing so, you can make Siebel look in accordance with the corporate brand book and slightly improve how users feel using the system. Still, these changes do not bring Siebel UX to the level users expect from web applications in 2019 when it comes to visual aesthetics and ease of use. 

Suppose that weeks of developing business processes, building user interface and integrating Siebel with other systems are gone at last; implementation can be considered completed, and users have started to work with Siebel. There are no fatal bugs, nor annoying performance issues. Still, there can be something left to improve, specifically ergonomics of your Siebel implementation – and, possibly, efficiency of users' actions and operations in Siebel.

In my previous article I described some basic tricks that are helpful for working with property sets. Here I am going to describe a few more tricks, which are still simple enough to quickly incorporate those in your daily routine. For doing something more complex, you can consider scripting, just as we did when we decided that workflows with huge number of steps are quite difficult and time consuming to develop and maintain.