TandemSeven

 "We knew we had usability problems, but we did not know how to put them down to make them actionable and solve our problems. TandemSeven's usability quick assessment gave us clear guidance of what we needed to do... I did not think it would have that much impact on changes to the product, but it became a guiding document which led to significant improvements to the user interface."

Mark Hadding, Global Director, e-Business
Siemens Building Technologies

The Challenge
When Siemens Business Technologies contacted TandemSeven, the company had several Web-based applications under development. SBT needed help with three initiatives: 

• To refine their technical strategy to support more client-facing portals
• To develop an IBM WebSphere commerce catalog application that would support all product ordering by integrating with backend systems including legacy mainframe and Oracle business applications 
• To lead the design of SBT's global customer service portal.

Mark Hadding, Global Director of e-Business for SBT, knew that TandemSeven could provide the strong WebSphere skills and technical team leadership he needed. What he did not realize, however, was that TandemSeven could also help with an equally daunting task: to ensure user adoption of the new applications.

TandemSeven Solution
SBT partnered with TandemSeven to manage the development of an important new release of their main order processing application. This order-entry application makes up the heart of SBT's eCommerce platform that runs on IBM WebSphere. The new release needed to add important functionality, upgrade to a new release of WebSphere and be capable of scaling to meet the demands of the whole company.

SBT also had two applications with known usability problems. However, the problems themselves were difficult to identify, define and resolve, hence improvement initiatives could not be prioritized. TandemSeven performed a Usability Quick Assessment on the two applications that resulted in the identification of hundreds of usability issues. TandemSeven usability experts grouped those issues and recommended improvements into a few manageable and prioritized initiatives.

The Results
TandemSeven utilized their usability-driven design process to help SBT re-design its applications' interfaces for superior ease of use. SBT made improvements based on TandemSeven’s recommendations and achieved improved user adoption and satisfaction with the applications.