6 principles of OSS UI design

When we talk about building capabilities by design, there are a set of four core capabilities that you should keep in mind:

  • Designed for self-sufficiency: Enable an environment where the business user is capable of acquiring, blending, presenting, and visualizing their data discoveries. IT needs to move away from being command and control to being an information broker in a new kind of business-IT partnership that removes barriers, so that users have more options, more empowerment, and greater autonomy.
  • Designed for collaboration: Have tools and platforms that allow people to share and work together on different ideas for review and contribution. This further closes that business-IT gap, establishes transparency, and fosters a collective learning culture.
  • Designed for visualization: Data visualizations have been elevated to a whole new form of communication that leverages cognitive hardwiring, enriches visual discovery, and helps tell a story about data to move from understanding to insight.
  • Designed for mobility: It is not enough to be just able to consume information on mobile devices, instead users must be able to work and play with data “on the go” and make discovery a portable, personalized experience.

Lindy Ryan in the book, “The Visual Imperative: Creating a Visual Culture of Data Discovery.”

When it comes to OSS specifically, I have two additional design principles:

  • Designed for Search – there is so much data in our OSS / BSS suites; some linked, some not; some normalised, some not; some cleansed, some not; This design principle allows abstraction from all those data challenges to allow operators to make psuedo-natural language requests for information. Noting that this could be considered an overlap between points 1 and 3 in the prior list
  • Designed for user journeys – in an omni-channel world, the entry point and traversal of any OSS workflow could cross multiple channels (eg online, retail store, IVR, app, etc). This makes pre-defined workflows almost impossible to design / predict. Instead, on OSS / BSS suite must be able to handle complete flexibility of user journeys between state / event transitions

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