Making IT management user-friendly

It goes without saying that truly remarkable product design can have a profound impact on the product’s success.

Apple and its entire portfolio is a perfect example of this. The tech giant has a knack for striking the balance between style and usability. Its long history of setting the tone for product designs that others dare to follow — with sleek edges, bigger screens, contemporary colours and lightweight materials — means that each new launch or upgrade is a major news event across the world.

The message is simple — a good design is important but a great design makes a product stand out from the crowd.

This is true with software as well as hardware. The widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets has led to the creation of millions of user-friendly apps for consumers. IAB Australia and Nielsen released research in 2015 which showed that Australian consumers spend close to 33 hours on smartphone apps each month.

In turn, this has sparked much interest in making business applications that are just as easy to use and as mobile as today’s executives need them to be.

Applying the modern product design principles found in consumer apps to IT management software can yield similarly significant productivity and valuable results for the businesses using them.

There are a few design principles in particular to watch out for, however, in the next generation of IT management tools.

Mobile is your best friend

Nowadays it’s pretty much a given that all aspects of the product should be accessible from a tablet or mobile phone, in addition to a web UI on a laptop or desktop. This means that the product must adapt to whatever interface through which the user needs to access and interact with it.

The time spent on mobile devices in Australia, according to the same IAB Australia and Nielsen research, is 43% of total time, compared to 39% on a desktop and just 18% on a tablet.

So considering mobile functionality and design is no longer an option but a must.

Responsive design — where, on a larger screen, you can expose more features, but on smaller devices such as a mobile phone, navigation and other information is available but not in your way — is a fundamental of any product appeal now.

And a crucial aspect of a mobile-first approach is to make sure that the apps have a native feel — so the iOS, Android and Windows apps should look and behave as if they are native to the mobile device.

Simplify, simplify, simplify

A sure sign of a well-designed app is its ability to perform highly complex actions while keeping the underlying complexity hidden from users behind a simple and intuitive interface. Additionally, remaining consistent with the features provided is essential for keeping things simple.

This could mean incorporating a search-driven approach to find things and take actions, and have it work the same way in every context. It’s important to use powerful, policy-driven automation, and be able to implement it reliably and at scale, with just a few clicks. This will save you a lot of time that you might otherwise need to train your technical staff on highly complex products.

Think out of the box with predefined content

In order to achieve simplification, we need out-of-the-box building blocks. The move towards simpler and easier IT management involves using content to deliver value quickly.

Delivering configuration in the form of prepackaged settings is an excellent example. Apps should include preset policy and profile definitions so that you don’t have to develop these things before you can start using them.

And it doesn’t stop there — prepackaged dashboard templates, agent procedures and automation scripts, profiles and reports can all make use of predefined content to deliver high productivity. Intelligent default values are probably the simplest form of content, and apps can make implementation much simpler by providing recommended choices by default.

None of this means anything without metrics

Management apps need to capture and present metrics that illustrate their impact on the business — ‘You can’t manage what you can’t measure’.

After all, the whole reason for even implementing an IT management tool in the first place is to enable your business to operate more effectively. It only makes sense that the app should provide the data to demonstrate value too. Let the app speak for itself.

By applying these principles, your IT management tools will be easy to use and will maximise productivity, efficiency and quality for users.