Enterprise-class desktop widgets
A couple years ago, I was asked by a local startup to create a next-generation UI architecture and vision for their IT asset management software. Their existing product is used by very large corporations such as Lockheed-Martin, CSC, and Innovapost to track IT hardware, software and services, as well as manage a configuration management database. At that time Apple had just released OSX and their desktop widgets. It was obvious that beyond popping up weather info, these widgets could do “serious enterprise asset management” tasks. Nik Beaudin, my ID student at the time, came up with this family of tear-away tools. We designed a few prototypes to do things like: Show real time concurrent users of a particular software license; show software license renewal alerts; indicate any pending workflow activity such as approvals or escalations; provide a quick search function for users or assets; and show performance metrics for workflow efficiency.
Unless you’re an IT manager, it’s hard to appreciate these widgets as novel. But – in the world of enterprise software – advances in the user experience are usually low in priority. Early market research of these tools left users “demanding them now!” The startup ranked them “low priority” and they were never developed.
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