Collaborate 2014 Roundup

We just finished another Collaborate conference for Objective Corp's international customers and it was a great effort by all; staff, partners and customers included.

The amount of effort that goes into the event is extraordinary, but the payoff is an event that informs, excites and inspires our customers to get more value from their Objective products (ECM, ECC and Connect) and change the way their organisations impact the world.

A big part of that is helping them drive business process innovation so they can deliver better services and products to the public.

Something we are doing across our products is looking to deliver great user experiences, especially ones that are customised for our customers' organisations so that they are received by their end users with credibility.

One of the challenges that raises is what an old colleague of mine used to call the "pink flamingo effect":

This is the tendency of some people to go wild with any sort of HTML customisation and add what they assume is an attractive element (e.g. pink flamingos) to an otherwise functional page.

We can't prevent that altogether, but a big part of the move we're making is to educate customers about the sorts of things they should consider customising (logos, fonts, colours) and how to consider the user experience when customising things that we have carefully designed, such as our responsively designed sample email templates.

To that end the slide above was used to help explain the difference between user interfaces (UI) and user experiences (UX).

Edit: See more about UI vs UX at my colleague David Eade's blog.