What things can you do in your business to make it fun for your customers?

Back in 2000 we drew up some plans to make an accounting system a bit like a Monopoly board. The idea being that as your business assets grew you would see an image of you factory grow. Your sales pipeline would expand into a bigger pipe as revenue grew. We wanted to bring some fun to accounting which can otherwise be a tad boring.

Due to the conservative nature of accountants (a good thing, they are just trying to protect their customers in many cases) we decided to hold off on that approach. Another reason was the difficulty in dealing with animation in web interfaces back then while meeting targets on load time for screens. We were also trying to avoid pagination. Pagination is where you show 1-50 of 7,000 transactions as an example and then provide buttons or links to show transactions 51-100 etc. Pagination can be really annoying for customers as we discovered during our user experience surveys.

In 2004 we started using AJAX (it didn’t actually have a name back then) which gave us the speed and flexibility to create a more designed interface and a better perceived speed experience for customers. We still use AJAX extensively in Payroll where editable data sets are smaller but you won’t see it as much in screens that have large editable data sets because it begins to become cost rather than a benefit in load times. The customer experience might be nice but if the screen load is slow the customer will just want to throw the computer out the window.

AJAX still has issues in this area but they are slowly being worked around. New browser like Google Chrome will allow AJAX to be used right across data heavy applications as it is a very efficient in dealing with JavaScript (the J in AJAX).

Being a fan of Wordpress for blogging I really like their spam removal experience. When you click delete it turns red (like slaying the spam dragon) and then slides away off the screen. The destroy feeling is quite good. Gamers amongst you would like it. We implemented this idea back in 2005 into our Payroll and Invoicing modules (without the blood effect).

We are started to work on some UI design changes to give customers a bit more fun in the screens but as always the accessibility will be the controlling factor given our mantra of ensuring the keyboarders aren’t compromised in anyway.

If any of you have suggestions or examples of animation for deletion, creation, edit etc. just let us know as we will be working up our changes to reports and transaction searching/listing over the next few weeks.

Photo credit: Cowbite