Enterprise Software where SMS is the only end-user interface

In my last post, i wrote a simple use case where a new employee is helped by the IT department via tweets and direct text messages. In this use case the only interface used was text messages. These messages can be posted and received even by the most rudimentary phones on earth. If enterprise software has to reach and benefit every person in the world, it should have the ability to adapt to the most basic interface, text.

I have been thinking for a while about this now and wonder, how a text only user interface for an enterprise application might work. I saw some interesting examples during my last visit to India.

Project Management
After a long career as a college professor, my mother now works for several women's welfare organizations in India. The project manager for one of her assignments is a young man in his thirties from another city.. Every day morning he texts the tasks to her cell phone. [My mother uses a regular Motorola phone.] At the end of the day she texts back her updates to him so that he can track and report. She looked at my BlackBerry and said, "You can do a lot with text". I am glad she never had to seen the interface of any enterprise software system. I tried to capture the use case here.

Employee On boarding
In my previous post I wrote a simple use case where an employee tweets about her status on the first day of work and IT staff of the company monitor her tweets to proactively to help her. Is it not great to tell your Net Generation new hires, to just walk into the office and tweet about what they are doing and what they are having trouble with. One of my colleagues, Girish extended that idea and said why just IT? Why not a community of self appointed employees who monitor new hires and help them settle down in a new workplace. A group of people will directly text them directly to tell them what to do.

This scenario can happen in any country, any industry, any language, any mobile phone. The behind the scenes text analysis software can be sophisticated. But for the new hire, there is practically no software involved.

I am sure there are wonderful ideas out there for using just text as a user interface. What are your thoughts? Any killer use cases for just SMS? If you share an idea with me, I might draw (no promises though) the use case in a comic strip format, post it here and give you credit for the use case.

User Story Scenes in a Comic Strip Format

It is hard to pack a message in three frames. But if you can, it will be great. Let me know what you think. This is a hypothetical use case where the IT department of a company is monitoring the tweets of a new hire on her first day and proactively supporting her.

Note: I made up this fictitious scene above. It is not from any specific project.

I tried this approach to create a 8 scene story. I was not sure how my colleagues at SAP will react to this approach. After the first discussion, to my surprise, we eliminated most of the PowerPoint slides with text and decided to use this story to convey our ideas and research to our team.

We requested a a colleague who neither wrote the story nor drew the pictures to narrate the story. She was able to narrate the story without any difficulty. I am confident that this approach is paying off.

Presenting to Colleagues
We presented a complete story with 8 scenes to our colleagues. We used one PowerPoint slide (which did not look like a PowerPoint slide) for every scene. The presentation was received very well. When we presented it to senior executives, they were able to jump into the story and discuss key aspects right away without worrying about the format. With a single glance, people were able to connect to the content of the story.

Construction of a Scene in a PowerPoint slide

1. Name of the story
2. Name of the Scene: This should be self explanatory.
3. The Comic Strip with two or three frames.
4. A short 2-3 line description of the scene with the design concepts highlighted.
5. A foot note with the design concepts and technical concepts covered in the scene. This is for the reference of the presented and to handle question and objections during the presentation.

Time
It takes a day to create a user story, if you have the story written down already.

The next step is to take approach to customers. More on that later.

Persona Diagrams Instead of multiple PowerPoint Slides with text

At SAP, design teams and many product managers routinely use personas to describe the target user. Using an illustration rather than a stock photo with some text next to it, helps people in the audience picture themselves in the role rather then see the user as someone else.

I learned from one of my colleagues, Jeremiah, that drawing an outline of the target user and leaving the facial details out is better than capturing all the details. You can create these illustrations from a photograph. Here is a sample user. A Net Generation employee who is used to getting things done on his phone. Conveys much more than 10 PowerPoint slides, does it not? This approach is very effective when presenting to executives, who normally have very short attention spans.


You will notice that the facial details are missing. This enables the audience to picture themselves in the role irrespective of their ethnicity. If you are interested in the tips and tricks of creating an illustration without hiring a full time artist, leave a comment and I'll add the procedure.

Collective Intelligence and The Art of Making Soft Chappatis

For a long time I could not make soft chappatis (Indian Flat Bread). Since my wife and I are rice eaters, it did not matter much and we did not try hard enough. It all changed when we were advised to add more wheat to our diet. You can buy chappatis from the local Indian store. But I am into this 'make everything from scratch' streak lately.

Since I am a big fan of collective intelligence, and believe in the future of long tail solutions, I decided to try the collective intelligence approach to find out if some one very similar to my family has faced this issue.

This was the criteria for my search. The target family has to be south Indian expats in the US (because they are rice eaters), with little time to spare and yet, have a desire to cook healthy food. More importantly, they must have faced the frustrating problem of dealing with flaky or wafer like chappatis and they must have been successful in making soft chappatis. They must have posted their experience, not just their solution on the web. Several others must have tried out their solution and must have verified that their solution works. If they are using any equipment that equipment should have been used, reviewed and commented upon by atleast a 100 people. Tall order, right? No. Turns out there is a South Indian family, working in the technology industry, that has faced this problem and has figured out a solution and has blogged about it. About 5-6 similar people have tried out the solution and given feedback about what worked and what did not work for them. There was confirmation of the process even from a Chinese lady, who is married to a (chappati eating) North Indian. It does not get better than this.

I tried out the approach recommended and it turned out better than my usual chappatis. I learned from the blogger that the key to soft chappatis is the following

• Knead the dough for atleast 15 minutes
• Add 2 spoons of oil to the flour
• Add 2 tablespoons of milk
• Use warm water to knead the dough
• Set the dough aside for 20 minutes before making chappatis
• Keep it overnight in a fridge for even better results

The key to making soft chappatis is the ingredients and the kneading. Since one of the readers in the blog said she used a food processor, I decided to, using the collective intelligence approach again, look for the best food processor to mix dough. Turns out the Kitchen Aid Artisan Food Processor is the most popular among home bakers in the US.

The listing on Amazon.com has 1656 reviews, most of which gave a 5 star rating for the product. There were reviews from a house wife who advised users on how to address certain common problems and reviews from an aircraft mechanic, who loves to cook, on the components used in the mixer.

So I ordered it and used it to make the dough. Now I get to pick whole grain wheat for my chappatis, they are soft and available in the quantities I need, when I need them.

Since I Shared this experince via my blog post and twitter, I received useful tips from friends who are experts at this. One my friends gave me this tip. Cook the chappati on the griddle for 30 seconds. Then flip it over and cook it directly on an open flame. This will make the chappati puff up and make it softer and give it a layered feel. When I have some time, I will post a video on how to do this.

The people who lost out on the process are the local grocery store that sells readymade chappatis. They will do fine without my patronage. Macy's (that sells the Kichen Aid Artisan Mixer) lost out because I am reluctant to buy anything that has not been reviewed by people who share the same problems as I do.

I even contributed to the discussion by suggesting a solution for one of the problems. The dough becomes dry when you keep it overnight in a fridge. The solution is to wrap the remaining dough in a Glad Cling Warp so that the dough retains moist.
 

Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin

I just finished reading the book Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin
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The book talks about how marketing is changing fundamentally. He argues that there is no mass market anymore.

Godin says that marketing needs to move away from interrupting as many people as much as possible to identifying the people who matter and asking for their permission to talk to them. I like his message. Don't be fooled by the cover. It is a seminal book.

I saw some parallels to how social media is changing the way employers treat employees. Employers who deploy social media tools without realizing that their relationship with employees is fundamentally shifting are in for some rude awakening. Although this book is written for marketers and points out how power is shifting from sellers to consumers, I believe the same concepts can be applied to human capital management as well.