Last week we discussed the three pillars on which we build our user experience. In addition to those three pillars, there are eight guidelines that we follow to ensure that our user interface is fun, simple, easy to use, and relevant to the enduser. The last of those qualities, relevant to the enduser, is the cornerstone of a successful experience. Fun and easy to use are irrelevant if the Talent and Performance Management system does not provide actionable, strategic data on your people. Our eight core guidelines are:

1. Simplicity
   This is a core value of the company, to make it as easy as possible for our users to do their jobs – reduce clutter and complexity wherever possible.
2. Efficiency
   Provide users with the most efficient means possible for them to accomplish their goals – in general, the fewer delays, page views, and mouse-clicks, the better.
3. Quality and robustness
   Because of the importance and sensitivity of our customer’s data, as well as the uptime (availability) of our product, our product must be precise, solid, well functioning, secure, and unbreakable.
4. Clear, direct, and honest communication
   We follow guidelines for communications that also happen to be good for user interfaces! Instructions and messages should never confuse the user.
5. Add value at every step
   We demand of ourselves to add “value” at every step. Every feature of our product should have some strategic reasoning behind it. If it doesn’t add value for our users, we must question why it’s there. To add strategic value, we strive for:      
   1. Relevance
      Our design must be appropriate and usable by the intended audience, and reflect the user’s world. We should avoid jargon and metaphors that don’t fit how users think of our product.
   2. Visibility
      We believe organizations work best when there is direct line of sight – people can see what they should be doing. The same holds true for user experience. If users can see and understand the capabilities of the system, they will be more successful in accomplishing their tasks.
   3. Accountability and results
      At the end of the day, our customers must justify the cost of using our product, and we have to be able to provide measurable results that show our product being beneficial, if not invaluable – everything we do should be mapped to a promise to make our customers’ companies better.
6. Improve cross-module integration
   One of the core benefits of the SuccessFactors platform is the ability for different modules to work together to deliver more value to the user. This is an inherent advantage that SuccessFactors has over products in silos or standalone products that may have been sewn together as a result of an acquisition.
7. Showcase user-centric innovations
   Ideas, needs, and solutions from user research are brought to the forefront in the SuccessFactors UI, while applying our deep design experience and knowledge of usability principles.
8. Kaizen!
   To keep delivering value to our customers, stay ahead of their needs, and maintain our edge on our competitors, we must constantly improve our product. We must evaluate it from every angle, identify and address its weaknesses, and constantly work to improve the product by working towards these design goals.

From the three pillars to these eight design guidelines, our GUI has one purpose – to unlock the potential gold mine of actionable, people-related data that resides within our fully integrated talent and performance management suite. As we have stated, the more people use our software, the more value is added to the transaction system, but there is another layer of value to be extracted from the richness of the data, not just the quantity. When businesses invest in multiple modules, Goal Management, Career Planning, Recruiting, Compensation, Performance Management, incredibly rich data is gathered that can help businesses make very strategic people decisions quickly and objectively. Our GUI is designed to help our users easily tap into that rich data to help them make the right decisions to drive people performance.

Often when meeting with customers and prospects I get the question: how do we make SuccessFactors so easy to use for managers and employees across the world? The question always arises from HR pros when I explain that we don’t build SuccessFactors for them, but rather for busy managers and individual contributors around the world. Fail to make it easy to use and no one will use it. Simple. No usage means no transactions, which means no strategic data. This leaves managers and executives in the dark when it comes to making decisions around the biggest cost to businesses today – people.

No one can afford to be blind sighted when it comes to their people. Now more than ever, with so much need for restructuring and resizing, this is critical. Our approach to designing the SuccessFactors Suite simply has to be different from “design for super users,” those who use the same tools day in and day out. It doesn’t matter much though if it’s hard to use, if users spend all their time figuring it out.

I decided to ask one of our User Interface leaders how we actually make it so easy and rewarding for people to use SuccessFactors. User Experience Manager Andrew Wong was pleased to share this with us. There are three pillars to the SuccessFactors approach to design:

1. User Involvement – Over the years, SuccessFactors has conducted volumes of research, including usability testing, focus groups, site visits, customer interviews, surveys, and usage data analysis. We talk to companies of all sizes, customers and non-customers alike. We also talk with end users — the managers and employees who use our product — not only HR professionals, whose challenges are often different than the everyday challenges that our end users face. You can often find us performing usability testing at trade shows and at our annual SuccessConnect user conference.
2. Innovation – We value the creative process and innovation, and we believe that innovation is what significantly differentiates SuccessFactors from products that stick to a more conventional approach. We constantly challenge ourselves to solve problems better than how they’ve been solved before, and we do not settle for “me-too.” Our NEXTlabs™ is a testament to our commitment to innovation. “New” and “exciting” are never words we avoid in our thinking. We lead with ideas, and we embrace change.
3. Corporate values – Another way we differentiate ourselves is by designing in a manner consistent with our founding principles: measurable customer success and delight, superior excellence, and constant improvement (Kaizen!). We also align our goals throughout the company and enforce our Rules of Engagement (including our “no jerks” rule) to ensure that we are all working well together, with nothing but our customers’ best interests at heart.

Our latest product, Stack Ranker, features many user-friendly design elements – it is visually appealing, easy to use, provides all the relevant information a manager requires at a glance, and strives for simplicity (see the screenshot). The Stack Rank appears clearly and cleanly on the right-hand side of screen. Easy-to-understand results will drive usage.

Our design pillars form the foundation of our truly User-Centered Design approach to building fun and easy to use software. Next week Andrew will share with us the 8 principles that drive our success in user interface design. We want our customers to get the most value out of their investment – creating a great user experience helps us to ensure that the system is used so customers will have a rich source of data from which to make their most important people-related decisions.