The balancing act of usability
In his comment on the previous post, Emmanuel Netter makes the point that construction industry expertise is more important than IT skills for document controllers. That's very valid. It points to the importance of usability, especially as systems gain features and become more and more configurable.
Construction has been quite slow to adopt technology and a common expectation is that new construction management systems will be difficult to use. In project collaboration, that can make it difficult to get everyone using a single system. So any construction document management application that hopes to get people on board quickly needs to think about intuitiveness and ease of use. For the larger vendors that can invest in this area, that falls to the User Interface (UI) team.
On one level it's important that online document management mimics the standard processes of the paper-based world. This reduces learning curves and encourages uptake. It lowers training and support costs later on, too. One of the challenges for a UI team - this is certainly true of ours - is to take these processes and see how technology can streamline them, while still keeping the system easy to use. For example, searching through 1,000 paper documents for a keyword would take hours; doing a Google-style search using a collaboration tool will get you the files you need in seconds. The interface (the simpler the better) belies the complexity of what is going on behind the scenes.
At some point, most people entering the industry won't even have been exposed to traditional document management methods. Ease of use, even more than features and functionality, may well determine exactly when project collaboration becomes the standard way to work.
Labels: Technology
