The trouble with portal dashboards…

By Janus Boye

Enterprise portals are supposed to make systems more accessible to real, live humans. But portal technology adopters today face several usability challenges, including complicated dashboard interfaces.

Based on hundreds of interviews CMS Watch has conducted with users worldwide, it’s clear that portal software customers must invest more in creating usable and accessible user interfaces. Today most organisations blindly adopt the default ‘building block’ approach to layout found in enterprise portals – a relic from the early days of public internet portals.

But users complain that while such an interface may look slick in early sales demonstrations, in production it typically only facilitates work for technically adept super-users. The occasional user easily gets confused and frustrated working with a cluttered screen of little boxes showing many different portlets. Getting adequate value from the portal typically requires substantial training.

Major software vendors, such as BEA, IBM, Microsoft and SAP are investing heavily in Ajax-based interfaces to improve usability but ‘super user’ screens predominate and it remains unclear whether an Ajax-based dashboard is really any better.

To be fair, vendors say that dashboards simply represent a default layout, but those involved in portal projects (developers, project managers, editors, business users) often work in an environment where the user interface is ‘assumed’, or they simply choose to accept whatever comes out of the box. The disadvantages of a clumsy interface often arise too late in their projects.

But effective presentation is critical to success. The practitioners – the buyers – need to become more demanding. What’s needed is a new approach. First, recognise that it is never too late to make the required improvements. Start by considering these basic issues:

What’s needed to align all parts of the portal with corporate style guidelines? Remember to include portal administration;
What type of user interface would be most productive for different use cases? Many buyers just think ‘enterprise portal’, without considering that there are many different types of portals for different purposes. In our research, we’ve identified seven common portal scenarios. Only one of them naturally lends itself to a dashboard interface;
Be prepared to invest in plenty of user interface work. Recognise that different tasks, by definition, will bring different usability norms.

Getting the right solutions will not be easy and will require testing. The answers may be revealing and you’ll probably end up far from the default portal interface. But the investment will be worth it.

Janus Boye is author of the Enterprise Portals Report, available from CMS Watch (www.cmswatch.com). The report provides comparative product surveys of 15 enterprise portal products. Boye is also managing director of Boye IT, a vendor-neutral content management consultancy. He can be contacted at editor@cmswatch.com.

Portal choices

Portal implementations frequently differ in scope. Some are designed to span the

enterprise, while others fulfill a specific business mission. Not surprisingly, all vendors in the Enterprise Portals Report call their products ‘enterprise portals’, but the reality is that they do better and worse across different use cases and vary substantially in complexity and cost. To better understand the various portal vendors, it can be useful to take a closer look at the following archetypal use cases:

Dynamic web publishing; the simplest use case and a common entry point for portal developers;
Self-service portal; enabling staff or customers to help themselves and obtain service on their terms;
Collaboration portal; enabling dispersed teams to work together on projects;
Enterprise intranet; helping staff work more efficiently, often via multiple specialised portal applications;
E-business portal; enabling enterprises to extend commercial information and services to external trading partners, suppliers and customers;
Enterprise integration; linking systems to achieve greater efficiency and agility.

Some vendors will do well in multiple scenarios, but as noted earlier, no vendor on the market today does well in all of these.