Book Review: Oracle User Productivity Kit 3.5 By Dirk Manuel
Anna Wichansky, Senior Director, Applications User Experience, and Chair, Oracle Usability Advisory Board
About Oracle User Productivity Kit Oracle User Productivity Kit (UPK) is a Windows application used by our customers to create training materials to support their use of enterprise applications. UPK captures the screenshots and interactions for each task in the real application, creating training packages for a range of deployments and documents in different formats from the same captured sources (Figure 1). Trainees experience the look and feel of applications and perform real interactions. The learning transfer is maximized through five different trainee experiences (or “modes”). Using UPK makes a traditionally cumbersome process of recording enterprise applications training much more efficient. You can read more about UPK on Oracle’s Web site. About the Book Oracle User Productivity Kit 3.5, the book by Dirk Manuel (Packt Publishing), is about 540 pages, including a preface, 13 chapters, appendices, and index. No software is included, although a download of the code samples used is also referenced in the book. The information is generic (relying heavily on SAP examples) and reflects UPK’s support for a wide variety of enterprise applications. The intended audience is new, intermediate, and experienced training developers. The content is comprehensive in scope, generally well-structured, and written in a friendly, “non-techie” style. Procedures, tables, and lists are used to make the reading easier. The information, which is process-driven from the perspective of the training developer, goes beyond “how-to” information to include planning, execution, and maintenance. Also included are practitioner gotchas, tips, and experiences about using UPK, including new features in version 3.5 (for example, automatic recording). By far an outstanding highlight of the conference was a tutorial on ISO standards for usability by Nigel Bevan, a leading British authority on international standards for usability. Nigel presented both introductory and advanced classes on this topic, which were well-worth the price of admission to the conference. I will provide a more detailed summary and review of relevant new standards for UX in a future usableapps article. The paper session I organized, which supported the Human Interface and Management of Information program track, featured a total of seven papers, four by Oracle contributors and the rest by other industry experts, on enterprise software UX design. The session was well-attended with a lively audience of academics, consultants, and industry representatives. I was particularly pleased to get kudos and well wishes on my discussion of the Oracle Usability Advisory Board, how it was formed, and how customers are using it to drive usability to the next level in next-generation products at Oracle. Papers were published in the conference proceedings, which are available on DVD and in Volume 8 of a 17-volume paperback set. I’ve provided links below to the abstracts of the Oracle papers presented at the conference for your reading enjoyment. All authors are from our Applications UX group unless otherwise noted. Customer Boards as Vehicles of Change in Enterprise Software User Experience. Anna Wichansky Crafting Contemporary Enterprise Application User Experiences Jeremy Ashley and Misha Vaughan Designing for the Next Generation: Generation-Y Expectations Patanjali Venkatacharya; Sean Rice; and Lulit Bezuayehu From Research to Product: Integrating Treemaps into Enterprise Software Joseph Goldberg; Jonathan Helfman; and John Beresniewicz (Oracle USA Configuration Management Group) Estimating Productivity: Composite Operators for Keystroke Level Modeling. Jeff Sauro The Factor Structure of the System Usability Scale- James R. Lewis (IBM Software Group) and Jeff Sauro
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