Software as a Service User Experience

Single process site automates vendor payables

2010-01-13T20:49:00.000-08:00

Another of the single process business software sites I have come across is Bill.com. Created by the former founders of Paycycle.com, the service automates the process of paying vendor payables. Information on the product can be seen here.

The product essentially allows you to email or fax a scanned copy of your vendor bill into a specific drop-box for your account. Once online, you categorize the expense and add a due date. When the due date approaches, a notification is sent to you to approve paying the bill. Once approved, the bill is deducted from your bank account and mailed by the service to the vendor. Prices begin at $24.99 a month and the service prepares entries for download into Quickbooks or Intacct.

Tax time is also made easy by having all source documents available online for audit.

This is another example of taking a singular process and perfecting its workflow with automation. Rather than reinventing the accounting process, this company has identified a specific area of concern in accounting and focused on creating a workflow process for SaaS that perfects it.

Tax time receipt help

2010-01-07T17:15:00.000-08:00

Found a terrific program for those of you who have to keep tabs on deductible items for either home offices, consultants or perhaps for self-employed or non-reimbursable expenses and is an excellent example of a singular process business concept. The product is called Shoeboxed and information for the program can be found here.

Generally the product allows users to receive a postage paid envelope with which to insert receipts and then forward on to the company. The service then scans the receipts and lists some basic information. The user has control over tagging the receipts and categories as well as basic reporting. Others, such as your CPA can have access to the files to view for tax information or you can download basic reports in Excel to print out for tax time. Audit in this case also becomes a breeze. Mobile users can also access via iPhone app or other mobile phone app. Business accounts run $49.95 per month and personal accounts $9.95 to $19.95. A free self scanning option is available with free trials as well.

Program video shows a nice clean interface with easy and logical user experience.

Singular process examples

2010-01-05T20:26:00.000-08:00

Am currently working on identifying quality singular process type applications on the web. By singular process I mean programs dedicated to one singular business purpose. Most will be around accounting topics, but I hope to find other SaaS companies that illustrate the concept of modular direction.

Apple tablet expectations

2009-12-27T23:18:00.000-08:00

Just finished an article on the hype surrounding the Apple Tablet PC. There are two things that appear apparent if history serves itself. One, Apple has created plenty of free press on the hype and why not, the iPhone is a HUGE success, so it breeds itself. And two, the user experience will likely be one of the best in computing. It appears a late January announcement is imminent.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Clean user flow

2009-12-01T17:15:00.000-08:00

I've been a fan of 37 Signals, a Chicago company that makes Backpack and Highrise products for the Internet (www.37signals.com). Their products offer excellent user interface design and the principals in the company are cult legends in the SaaS world. I recently took notice of a new blog for them called Design Explorations and it is an excellent narrative on the way software designers come to make decisions regarding user interface design.

I was especially intrigued by the posting regarding due dates on to-dos and not so much for the actual thought process, but more in the actual UI flow. You can find the post with a video at 37signals.com/designexplore/Basecamp_To-dos.

One of the principals at 37 Signals was one of the original architects of Ruby, an object oriented programming language. There is some Javascript here as well but the interactivity is outstanding with no screen refresh to accomplish the experience.

How to fail as a SaaS company

2009-11-19T17:15:00.000-08:00

I've just finished reading a brief article on moving to SaaS by Abraham Sultan, an EVP at Apprenda. The article was entitled "How To Fail Miserably as a SaaS Company" and is a follow up to his presentation on the same. The article can be found here: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/3842451/How-to-Fail-Miserably-as-a-SaaS-Company.htm.

One of the bullet points caught my eye and is similar in tone to one of my earlier posts on delivery model. Mr. Sultan states, "...customers are expecting the software to be updated frequently and to stay on top of current trends both in your industry as well as with general environmental events."

I believe customer expectation changes quickly in SaaS and is partly a result of the way it has been marketed as well as due to our expectations of what the Internet holds. The Internet is the holy grail of business potential, or so we have been led to believe for years now. It is the culmination of the social experience, it lets us reach markets and customers we never could reach before and its technology is the purple pill for all our previous business technical failures.

A cornerstone marketing statement I have heard over and over is that the IT responsibility is moved from your business to ours and updates are quick and seamless. This is a SaaS tenet. However, expectations must be adjusted for SaaS to succeed long term. Granted, the IT responsibility has shifted and for many smaller businesses, this is a boon. However we must remember what it takes to run one of these data centers and provide 99.98% up-time. We must be careful to market it as a quality improvement and not a magic bullet.

It is true, SaaS companies must deliver change frequently, but more importantly it must be change that is meaningful. Change for the simple sake of change is not change, it is controlled chaos. Meaningful change takes into account the specific needs of the users and targets that business need completely and efficiently. SaaS succeeds when expectations are marketed honestly and meaningful products are delivered. It is then that we understand the Service part of Software-as-a-Service.

Modular marketing

2009-11-01T17:15:00.000-08:00

In an earlier post I spoke briefly about companies who choose to migrate their large enterprise products to a distributed software as a service model. In doing so, I believe many make mistakes in the transition by failing to see "the trees in the forest". There are opportunities hidden in the application that may present a restructuring opportunity for the organization. As mentioned before, I see this concept called "modular marketing".

Say for example you have a law office management system that handles things such as document management, scheduling, CRM functions, research, and the accounting functions of the firm. Traditionally, for a law firm to purchase your software they would need to purchase all of the integrated components in one management system package. You've likely identified your target market and sold many contracts and have a pretty good client base. The client base may be on a client-server environment or already on SaaS.

The key to modular marketing is looking at the individual business opportunities in the entire product. In our example above, there are 5, but there may be more. Instead of offering the entire product, it makes better sense to offer the products standalone and integrated. Once a data transfer model and format is agreed upon by the individual teams, each component can then be broken up. For example the team that is assigned to work on document management can build a standalone application for document management on its own deployment schedule. Provided the data components needed to make it communicate and integrate with CRM and other functions remain pristine, the company has now freed up the team to be autonomous and for QA to be more focused on that product and less on regression testing the application as a whole when that component is modified.

Secondly, from a sales perspective, the company has reopened the market to be viable for that component. They may have found a unique advantage in document management. Provided that a standard for data transfer is met, such as .xml, it can become easier to integrate with your competitors products by allowing your market to drive them to do so, without purchasing your entire product. As a company, you get your foot in the door by providing a complete solution to a specific business need. Many companies, especially in this economy, are reluctant to make global changes to their infrastructure for fear of the impact of change on their productivity. In this manner, your modular product provides them with a small change with big upside. You will have an easier time later integrating your other products as they change them out because you have the all-important foot in the door.

Lastly, from an internal capital perspective, modularizing allows companies to work on components and deliver faster to market on something salable. They do not need to wait for the restructure of the whole product and can see a quicker return on investment on the components.

Software as a Service a delivery model?

2009-10-20T20:32:00.001-07:00

Software as a service is a delivery model.

I've read many posts of late trying to explain software as a service, cloud computing, service model marketing, etc. But if you boil it all down, SaaS is a delivery model. A different (and successful) way of delivering software. Sadly, many companies are trying to port their existing applications over to the Internet by recreating their applications in similar formats to their CD, DVD, bundled/boxed software. This is a disastrous approach for a number of reasons.

Each iteration of the bundled software made the product bigger and harder to maintain. Hence, if you are a software company, why SaaS looked so attractive to you in the first place. It made it easier to distribute. One update and everyone was on the same code-base. No more supporting multiple iterations of the software either and bogging down support staff with the burden of knowing all the version changes. It made delivery easier.

However, along the way companies began to recreate rather than re-think in an effort to ride the big Web 2.0 wave. Each day we learn of old products now being re-marketed on the Internet as SaaS. It seems like a good idea, right? We get to deliver faster to market and reduce delivery costs. But it is still the same old product.

Companies need to rethink their current software model and begin to look at what I am going to call here as Modular Marketing. In coming posts I will discuss my thoughts on how SaaS provides companies with an opportunity to re-engineer their revenue models around singular processes that not only can stand on their own but also complement each other in their integration. The most successful SaaS companies on the Internet are built around similar complementary models.

SaaS is definitely a delivery model. But it can be one that delivers on an expansion of market opportunities as well as more efficient workflows and integration.

What makes a great web application?

2009-01-07T17:12:00.000-08:00

Hope the 2008 holidays were good for everyone. As I start off 2009 I am curious from a design perspective..."What makes a great Internet application?"

This is a more difficult question than first appears. Is it that the application is simple and solves a singular task? Programs like Twitter and Backpack make singular work processes and social communications easier by attacking just that problem and solving it. Does an application have to be large and imposing to be a great application? Do we need our applications to do so many things we might never use them all? Or do we just need a hundred applications that do those 100 things extremely well. I call the latter, the iPhone philosophy. In the iPhone, the platform was developed and little else. Then applications for it sprouted up overnight and a culture was born.

From a business perspective, Salesforce.com has made millions creating a core CRM platform and extending it by offering the ability to connect to it through a freely available development platform. All over the world people and companies are building add-on apps for Salesforce.com making it a super-app that can be used by any industry. If an industry doesn't have coverage, someone can just build an app for it.

In my humble opinion, all apps over the next 10 years will be built on this same philosophy. But is the best of breed approach the best approach? Comments welcome.....

eBay Desktop another AIR/Flex winner

2008-10-22T19:00:00.000-07:00

I have many friends who are in to the whole buying and selling on eBay and have made some nice additional money doing so. In the process of my research into RIA's (rich internet applications), I found a great application that is geared towards those who find the eBay world a culture of its own.

The application is called eBay Desktop and it is an AIR (www.adobe.com/air) application, built with the Flex language. In previous posts I have talked about AIR and its ability to take a web application and move it to the desktop while maintaining the data connection to the web. It also allows for offline storage of data through an SQLLite database and the ability to synchronize when connected.

The eBay application is a great example of a Rich Internet Experience without the tether of the browser. The app is cross-platform compatible, so if you run Windows, Leopard or Linux you only have to download the single app. Pretty cool! You can check out a demo video of the app and download it for free here - eBay Desktop Application. A great blog on the application can be found at http://desktop.ebay.com/blog/.

AIR version of Acrobat.com delivers a super user experience

2008-10-21T17:15:00.000-07:00

I have been using the Acrobat.com website for a couple of months now for file sharing, presentations and especially for Buzzword, the RIA word processor built on Flex and AIR. I highly recommend the product to anyone who needs the following:

web-based access to files
file sharing
.pdf creation
shared presentations
free web based word processor

Buzzword is a free word processor built in Flex and includes all the major features you would need including tables, image positioning, commenting, lists, headers, footers and a cool history feature.

Another cool feature of the Acrobat.com beta is the ability to download an AIR version of the program. I'll be posting about AIR more in coming posts, but for now, just know that it is a way of extending a web-based application to the desktop. In the Acrobat.com AIR app, you can minimize the application to a small widget on your desktop for access to all the products quickly. Works like having a extra drive there on your desktop-I can even drag and drop files to the widget.

So check out this great Rich Internet Application and excellent user experience at www.acrobat.com. For now the product is in a beta, so be cautious to any bugs, but I have yet to find a bug and sincerely hope this service will remain free.

Touting the Rich Internet Experience

2008-10-16T17:15:00.000-07:00

Applications are moving to the Internet, period. I cannot see a reason why a company would not want to move their application to an Internet hosting solution. The many reasons are compelling:

Faster delivery to market
Single code base
Single support mechanism
Reduced or eliminated pirating of software
Mobility

Even as more companies make this move to the Internet with their applications, there are still too many that believe that an Internet app is just their existing application moved from the desktop to the browser.

This blog is a study on the concept of a "Rich Internet Application". This is sometimes referred loosely as Web 2.0, but I think the term is now overused. Companies such as Adobe are offering development platforms such as Flex that are leveraging a more interactive experience and companies such as Oracle, SAP and SalesForce.com are listening.

This blog will be a collection of those sites that I find that I think leverage the concept of Rich Internet Application. My industry is insurance technology and more specifically accounting as I am a software professional who just happens to also be an accountant. I am saddened by the lack of better user experiences as I think as users, we are all owed this. I hope to potentially turn this analysis and discussion into further talking points and understand more fully the "User Experience".