My OOW14 - Oracle Applications User Experience Day

The now traditional OAUX training day was the Wednesday before OOW, and this year was opened up to a few select partners in addition to the user advocates of which I am one.

It was a great day with a full room at the conference centre in Redwood Shores and a lot of the UX team there to share their expertise. The day kicked off with Jeremy Ashley their VP talking about their work and setting the scene for the workshop.

They went through all the UX messages which I know are the major differentiator with Cloud (previously known as Fusion) Applications. There were breakout groups for the different families HCM, ERP, CX and Extending.

Extending is really important to me as in my new role I will be responsible for the move by Certus into PaaS. Amazing here is their Rapid Development Kit and we will certainly be using this with their help.

There was some talk about the UX of Fusion being made available to traditional apps but at this stage no program name was given, later in the week we got to know this was Alta. Press Release

In the afternoon Jake Kuramoto and Jeremy did a session on Shinny Things - wearables and other new technologies they are looking at, and my favourite quote from Jake "google glass is so last year" - this looks like fun and it is, but there is also a very serious side to this as Oracle needs to understand where this technology can be used in the enterprise. One area I am very interested in is the use of voice especially in mobile and the Oracle agreement with Nuance (Dragon software) makes this very real.

Jake's team have also created a wearable for OOW which I got to try out at their showcase event. You pre registered your interest priorities in the five areas they were showcasing and the wearable lit up the colour of the stand to visit first. Then once you waved the wristband in front of a device on the stand the colour changed to match your next priority. It was a bit of fun for this event but imagine being able to select online where in a shopping mall or even just a department store you want to visit and a wearable tell you where to go. GPS for shopping - brilliant.

The pitch back participants plus Ultan and Misha from UX team.

At the end of the day they had a pitch back competition, and I was part of it along with Gustavo Gonzalez Figueroa , Lonneke Dikmans, Floyd Teter and Sten Vesterli. We all got a prize but the overall winner for the undisclosed objective of BS bingo was the big man himself, Floyd. Always a gentleman the picture shows his humility in victory. But seriously Floyd along with the rest of us really believe in the UX work at Oracle and the value it has to the development if their applications.

The day then ended with a small reception but it wasn't the end of UX for OOW, it got a mention on several keynotes especially Larry's first one, but let them tell you their story.

I also got to help out in one of the UX sessions during OOW.

Thanks again to everyone in UX especially Misha for a great day.


Return to my OOW overview