As I’ve evolved through my career one thing that I’ve come to realise is the most successful solutions are the ones that make people’s jobs better.
The key reason that I think this is that if the solution is technically perfect, meets the specification but is a pain in the arse to use then fundamentally people will find another way of doing it.
This focus on thinking about user experience is something that has enabled me to support organisations in creating solutions that make a real impact. This article will go into ways that I go about engaging ‘users’ to understand what outcomes we need to achieve their goals and how we can deliver in the Low Code ecosystem.
Ultimately, for me user experience is a combination of all the different technologies that you can leverage to achieve the outcomes that are needed.
Here are the core user experience options that we can provide to users in modern ecosystem of ‘Low Code’ within the Power Platform.
- Portals
- Applications
- Automations
- Chatbots (inc.. Copilot studio)
Each of these are the options that we commonly have available to enable the users of our solutions to have the best experience to achieve the outcomes available.
When you scale solutions and user bases within the solutions that you are creating one core element to remember is that it is unlikely that a single ‘experience’ is going to be the preferred solution for each user within that group.
These preferences vary significantly for many factors from:
- Age
- Education level
- Technical proficiency
- Social factors
- Disability
One of the key ways of demonstrating this difference in the way that different users that may have the same desired outcomes is through a personal experience when working with school children doing a ‘coding for schools’ programme.
On one of the first lessons that I taught on scratch for children ages 4-6 some of them had never used a computer before, however they had used tablets and mobile phones.
This meant that it was difficult for these children to use a computer compared to the children that were familiar with a mouse and keyboard.
I always draw upon experiences like these throughout my career so far to think of the ways that we as people that create technical solutions can provide the best experiences to users.
If we take this to the Power Platform and the low code ecosystem some questions that you could ask yourself before going down the default route:
- Does this need to be an app?
- What about an adaptive card?
- What about a chatbot?
- Can this be an automation process?
- Does this experience offer the best experience for all users?
- What accessibility considerations should be accounted for?
- Will this solution scale?
- Can this solution reduce the learning curve?
- When you install an app, you don’t use a ‘training guide’ so why should we create ‘user guides’ for mobile apps at work?
- How does this solution or component flow in the users ‘workflow’?
Ultimately, designing solutions within the Power Platform and the broader low-code ecosystem is about more than just meeting technical requirements but it’s about creating intuitive, impactful experiences that make people’s jobs easier and more efficient. By carefully considering user preferences, technical abilities, and the specific outcomes they are trying to achieve, we can deliver solutions that people not only use but genuinely appreciate.
As I continue to develop and scale solutions, it’s crucial to keep asking the important questions.
- Are we truly meeting users needs?
- Are we leveraging the right tools and technologies to support their needs?
By keeping user experience at the forefront of our design process, we ensure that the solutions we build today will continue to deliver meaningful, long-term value.
The low-code revolution offers us incredible flexibility and power to design user-centric experiences. It’s up to us to harness this potential and create solutions that not only solve problems but also transform the way people work.
JackBinnall 