Serena Business Mashups is a productivity suite including web and Win32 components, which brings application development within reach of business analysts.

As Sr. User Experience designer for Business Mashups I owned user interaction across the entire suite, ensuring that all product designs met industry heuristics and story acceptance criteria. I created stories in the Agile context for new and revised task flows, and designed and conducted usability evaluations with users.

One particular gain was adapting the UX process to Agile's sprint and release code freezes.

Thumbnails below provide some details on my work with Serena Business Mashups.

Serena Business Mashups Product Suite

Serena fielded a suite of four Mashup products - one Win32 component, Mashup Composer, and three Web components - to enable business analysts to rapidly connect disparate systems and data, without calling on IT. My task was to enhance the user experience for all products while providing a visible mental model.

Click for a snapshot of the Serena Business Mashups product suite.

Enhanced menu nesting

Working within the MS Office 2007 Fluent UI license, it was still possible to afford better flows and visual cues in menu navigation.

Click for a snapshot of the Mashup Composer menu folding.

In-Context User Guidance

Providing small cues such as meanings or definitions helped prompt inexperience users in their initial work with Mashup Composer. This is typical of guidance that was provided in many task flows.

Click for an example of the Mashup Composer user guidance.

Mashup Taxonomy in the Composer UI

The Mashup Composer UI did not communicate the structure of the object it edits, the mashup. There were many disparate definitions of what a mashup was, which suggested various mental models. We spent a great deal of time working out mashup taxonomy and how that would be reflected in the Composer UI. This involved creation of new, more explicit UI menu nodes, and a reorganization of task trees within those nodes.

Mashup Composer Branding

The Mashup Composer UI did not have the Serena name or logo on it. The Office 2007 Fluent UI license stated that logos could be incorporated on the ribbon if they were functional. We then created a ribbon group that linked to the Serena website, and to a pair of resources, the original Composer Start Page, and online release notes.

Guidance Comics

In Composer's mashup taxonomy as represented in the UI, there were tree nodes at principal editors such as for workflows, the Web interface, user roles, etc. that produced only white space in the main editing pane. This no-op made beginners doubtful, as there was a second action required to arrive at the local object editor.

I saw this unused space as a potential advantage - prime real estate for what I came to call Guidance Comics, a collection of visual explanations of the primary editing needs of each particular editor.

Executed in Flash, each visual would provide a quick orientation and reminder, with a clickable more button that would enlarge the visual with more detail. Finally, each comic panel would link to the corresponding section in the online help, an asset Serena had already developed.

Click for an example of the Guidance Comics.