Understand Why The User Experience Is So Vital to Solution Adoption and Success
Middleware, traditionally known for connecting data in different applications, but this isn’t enough in today’s age. To gain the maximum value of middleware requires a front-end user experience that sits atop it and allows people to gain insight, collaborate and make decisions. Users don’t need to know where the data is coming from, just that it is the right data, delivered to them in a way they can take action on.
Emphasizing the user experience while connecting backend data is important, providing users with intuitive workflows and seamless collaborative project information management tools is equally vital. Without a user-friendly interface and governance structure, even the most robust solution can fall short of its potential.
On this episode of the ProjectReady podcast, CEO Joe Giegerich and Head of Development Shaili Modi Oza delve into the significance of metadata mapping, APIs, and cloud technologies in building and using integrated solutions, emphasizing how these elements facilitate data integration across diverse systems. Additionally, the duo seeks to help listeners understand the importance of choosing systems that are conducive to integration and why it is so important for organizations to prioritize user-friendly interfaces, standardize processes, and choose systems that enable seamless data integration to harness the full potential of all the data you work with on an AEC project.
During This Episode Listeners Will Learn:
- Why The User Experience Is Vital To Successful Adoption: Understand why a seamless and user-friendly interface is essential for the success of solutions that bring data together, enabling users to access, interact with, and collaborate on data effectively.
- The Significance Of Metadata Mapping and APIs: Explore the significance of metadata mapping and application programming interfaces (APIs) in modern middleware, and how they facilitate data integration across various systems.
- How To Choose The Right Systems: Learn about the importance of selecting systems that are conducive to integration and how cloud technologies have revolutionized data connections.
- The Difference Between Standardization and Off-the-Shelf Solutions: Discover the benefits of standardized processes and off-the-shelf solutions like ProjectReady, which leverage collective experiences to provide user-friendly and standardized middleware layers for enhanced data management and collaboration.
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Transcript
Joe Giegerich:
Hi, everybody. This is Joe Giegerich again from ProjectReady, and as always, with us today is Shaili Modi-Oza, the head of development here. And as we continue along different podcast topics, today, one of my favorite taglines is that UX is the new middleware, or the user experience is the new middleware. And so, we’re going to go into a bit what we mean about that. And so previous podcasts, we talked about Teams and the AEC and managing email. We do have upcoming podcasts as well, which is Solving the Challenges of Owners in the AEC: It’s a Modular World, which is the one I’m really looking forward to. We’re just lining up our guests as we speak and a deeper dive into metadata. But it’s a modular world really kind of sums up a lot of what we’re going to be talking about here today, what an IDE is. And so, a lot of those concepts will come together in that cast.
So, let’s start there. So, we had done a piece about what an Integrated Data Environment is, right? And so, all right, it’s integrated data and we get this when we present it to customers and the like, going, “Oh, so you’re a data mart. You’re a middleware.” But we’re not, right? We have an element which is middleware, but what’s really important to us is the user experience that sits on top of it. So my contention is is that you can build all the greatest connections between backend data you want, but if there’s not a user experience that allows people to access it, if there isn’t workflows and governance so people can collaborate on the data that’s being aggregated in a centralized database like we do, then it’s often not. It’s more than a report, right? And so, middleware, traditionally, is software that connects data in different applications, right, so that they can communicate.
So, Shaili, let me turn it over to you right away and tell me what you consider middleware to be and then let’s talk about what we both think the user experience element is.
Shaili Modi-Oza:
Yeah, yeah, definitely, Joe. And I think as you brought it up, it’s basically the connection and in, I guess, the simplest terms, it is the application that connects two different software or two different components of applications and brings it together. That’s why it’s called middleware. Its kind of just makes that connection. And I think generally, in the terms of IT, middleware is considered as the API or something that happens in the backend. It is that code that is used to integrate these systems. And now, in the newer cloud technologies, all of those are just the APIs which we can get the data, we can send data to all these different systems.
But essentially, I would think that is what happens in the backend, which is hidden from the end users because they don’t actually see all of that, what’s happening in the backend. It’s kind of the architecture in place that connects all these systems together and giving that user-friendly frontend where the users can make these interactions would be the frontend portion of that to be able to take benefit from all the transactions that are happening across these systems.
Joe:
And to interact with that aggregated data as well. And I guess arguably, too, you could even say that a digital twin is kind of middleware because it brings together building information, BIM information, and other data points. And that aggregated data point is that aggregation of data is, in fact, kind of what a digital twin is. Is a digital twin a smarter piece of middleware? I don’t know if I’m oversimplifying it or misstating that, but…
Shaili:
Yeah, I would think that it has a lot of different components, not just the APIs, but as you mentioned, the data that kind of comes together from all these different systems as well, that that is one of the main components of the system. It’s the interactions that happen through APIs, the backend data that connects all these systems and the consolidation of all that information, including the actual platform, the database, all of it coming together.
Joe:
And middleware has been around for a while. It just had different iterations of it or different types of it, if you will. I mean, going back, I’ve been in the industry for a while. Think about BizTalk back in the day and data transformation services. This is all a way to map data and that was more on-prem. And as you mentioned, APIs, particularly in cloud technology, boy, you can do a lot of stuff now, right? And this also even pivots back into our metadata discussions where for APIs to interact and create meaningful data within a middleware environment, if you will, that metadata is what you’re mapping. Is that not a fair representation?
Shaili:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. With cloud technologies now, all of the different systems are hosted separately. They all have their own set of APIs, different data points, and data sets and that’s always a complexity of interacting with all of them together as a whole instead of the separate instances.
Joe:
But the metadata is what I’m harping on right here for this second is… so let’s take our work bridge feature, right, where we connect RFIs out of Procore and to ACC and back and forth. So, when users go in and set that up inside our system, they’re literally mapping name fields because, right, the one name in Procore has got a slightly different name inside ACC.
Shaili:
Right.
Joe:
And what middleware does is map that and APIs allow the data to go across that mapping. So far so good?
Shaili:
Definitely. That’s correct. Yeah, taking RFI as an example as well. In different systems, there are different data points to identify what the RFI subject is, what are the different statuses, who is responsible for answering the RFI? So, as you said, all of these data points are different, and they need to have that kind of mapping. If you want to have that end-to-end integration from one system to another, there needs to be that kind of metadata mapping to just bring it together, for sure.
Joe:
Yeah, and that was my contention at the beginning here is that all these different topics we’re exploring, or at least a lot of them, right? It’s a modular world. The IDE, the metadata podcast that we’ve created, they all really do intersect.
All right, so I’ll stop there. Let’s go over to the user experience. So the user experience was something I learned early on in my career is pretty much everything for something to succeed. When we started out on our services practice, we started focusing on SharePoint and specific from our other company, geez, 20 years ago. And you’d build things, but if they were cumbersome, if they were clunky, if there were too many clicks, all the paradigms of the modern age, right, of the internet age, which is not so modern anymore. It’s been around for a while, right? It was all about the user experience. And one of the things that I had always noted within large enterprises and endeavors within IT was the user experience was never really kind of front and center.
And so, with this traditional view of middleware as a data mart, as a data exchange marketplace, if you will, it’s all well and good. You map metadata. You have APIs available, but it’s more than a Power BI report or some other report, right? It’s got to be driven by user experience. In other words, you’ve got all that great data now. How are people going to interact with this? Because at the end of the day, the one thing that people will always have a unique skillset, above AI and everything else, is to collaborate on information, right? And so now that you’ve established this great middleware layer, it’s paramount to drive this through user experience. So, do you want to pick up from there a little bit?
Shaili:
Yeah, definitely. And talking about all the different systems as we’ve been talking, I think as an end user, it just makes that very difficult, kind of a learning curve to just go through all these different systems, all the different user experiences. So I think the middleware functionality that we talked about where we are connecting and bringing these systems together and having this user experience layer over it makes it so much easier for the end user where basically, they have this interface, which it’s easy to learn and easy to interact with, which brings in the data from all of these systems together. And that just makes the whole end user experience that much easier.
We in ProjectReady make sure that all of the workflows have this kind of a similar look and feel where the user is navigating how easy it is for the user to find all of the different things going on in the project. I think that just enhances the whole experience as an end user to just have that quick learning experience and get things done.
Joe:
I go even further than that. It’s not only beneficial. It’s essential, right? Because let’s think about it. So now you’re aggregating data. People are creating this data, right? They’re doing inputs in different systems. They’re coming together in a unified bit of middleware, in our case, with this unified user experience across it.
So, you want people… so if they’re going to ingest data, if you’re going to manage project information, you have to be able to collaborate on it. And that collaboration itself will add yet more meaningful and rich data to the middleware, garbage in, garbage out, all these things tied together, folks, right? And so, project information management has to be collaborative, project information management, and that’s driven by the user experience. Setting up something that’s really slick on the backend and making it difficult for people to go in and interact with it means they just won’t do it. They won’t use the system. They won’t contribute to it. And that was the real barn-burning eye-opener for me 20 years ago in my career is that the backend could be, “Eh, whatever.” If the user experience is there, people adopt it, and it ultimately has more value.
Shaili:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think it’s that day-to-day interaction. It’s extremely important. No matter how organized and well-defined the backend is, what the end user sees is the UX where they go to every day, the things they click, the navigation. I think all of it is extremely important to get that success for a project, for sure.
Joe:
And to continue to enhance that dataset, right, because the data that you’re really analyzing is not just metrics on a building and the like. It’s what the consequence of data is. And that consequence and its understanding is driven by folks working in unison, collaborating on that information. All right, I’ve beaten this pretty well to death, but it’s something that needs to be beaten to death.
And so with it, strategically within an organization, there are a couple of things that come to mind that you really should focus on, right? One is choosing the systems you choose to work with, right? If systems are antiquated and legacy-based, they’re just not going to afford you a whole lot of ease of the creation of a middleware layer, right? So for one, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud.
And the other thing is how do you handle user experience for employees? And I have found there’s a great deal of success in these very iterative… if you’re going to build a custom versus getting something off the shelf that does it like what we do is to really work with those end users. I mean, even with our product which is developed, we’re always going back to end users and going, “So customer or client, X, Y, and Z,” to me, they’re all peers and we all collaborate on that regard, “how do we improve that user experience?” And it’s this constant cycle of listening to your users, delivering something, but getting their feedback. Just sort of as a quick recap, understand what data points you want to bring together, make sure the applications you choose going forward play nice in the sandbox as it were, right? Because there’s APIs and then there’s APIs, right? There are more modern ones, things that have rest APIs and webhooks and the like and that user experience where you’re going to go to committee and the like.
But honestly, companies like ours and a lot of other companies out there have already gone far down the road to facilitate meaningful middleware and user experiences and workflow and automation within the enterprise. So, this is something else that not only are we obviously looking to drive business our way but is a reasonable consideration. Why reinvent the wheel?
The advantage of off-the-shelf stuff like what we represent is we’re not just working with your company. Our experience isn’t based upon one company’s experience. It’s based upon a lot of companies’ experience. There’s benefit on a vendor who has succeeded in building something that’s state-of-the-art and the like because we do enjoy that larger collective set of experiences across different customers and frankly, across what is a very massively horizontal industry. I mean, people talk about the AEC between the trades and subs and GCs and architects and engineers. There are so many flavors within there. You think about middleware, with the user experience that drives it is that interaction and a great example, Shaili, why don’t you talk a little bit about our content cart?
Shaili:
Yeah, definitely. So, the content cart is like, I would say, the Amazon shopping cart kind of an experience which all the users are used to nowadays. And the whole idea behind it is that for a project, we would have documents in a variety of different systems and the content cart is kind of that unique user experience that brings it together. So, it doesn’t really matter where your documents come from. Some of them would be in SharePoint and ACC, Procore, all the systems that we connect to. And we can basically bring all of those together in a single interface. You can browse the SharePoint library. You can go to your Procore documents and just select documents from there and then create content package for, let’s say, a transmittal or a submittal that you’re trying to get done and just bring all these pieces together in one single user interface.
Joe:
Right, we’ve already built all those connections. You don’t have to go looking for each. They’re all in line. When you go to Amazon, you’re buying, I don’t know, one item from an Amazon partner and another one from Amazon directly, but you’re adding it to one shopping cart and checking out. And the value that companies like ours can bring to that party… look, every project you go on, you’re going to have different iterations. You have your own systems, other people’s systems. You have what the client demands you to use. So, having a way to consistently interact with data on that middleware is one of the big things that we drive toward, right? Because if you add PlanGrid and take out Procore, the way you manage that data should not change.
Shaili:
Yeah, and now, especially just kind of going on with all the different APIs that are available across these systems, we’ve seen so many companies that, like you mentioned, Joe, the processes are a little different, even at different project level, forgetting the entire company. So, people start building these custom things with the APIs and there is no consistency because it’s agile, there are different processes, and it just becomes very chaotic. Having something that is more user-friendly and more, I guess, consistent across all the different processes, different projects. That’s what we’ve tried to do with ProjectReady where while it’s easy to use, it has a lot of different features, making it flexible, yet giving that consistency to end users to kind of configure it in the way they need and still be able to use it across projects, I think.
Joe:
Yeah, driving it home. The user experience is the new middleware. That user experience should represent standards that are repeatable and agnostic of the different systems that a piece of middleware are connecting. Because without that, it’s just chaos and to your point, Shaili, you’re going to build one series of integrations. Whoops, different project. Let’s try something else. And again, end users are going to walk. Business continuity traditionally has meant that you lost your data center.
The new business continuity is shifting end user experiences. That’s where you lose continuity within a business. It’s about process, right, and that’s what that user experience represents: process. Simple, easy processes that are easy to interact with and that’s what’s going to drive that success.
All right, well, I guess this one’s going to be pretty short and sweet, folks, but it is an important topic to note that it’s not just about connecting data. It’s about connecting data in a way that people can interact with it and that the institution can then enjoy standards and processes and reliable data that you can plug into digital twins, that you can run artificial intelligence and analysis against and have data-driven decisions.
And so, this will be picked up again and in large measure, bringing all these different topics together in It’s a Modular World as a webcast that we have coming up or that’s the working title currently. And the contention in that webcast is that systems come and go, but an enterprise is more than one system. An enterprise’s efficiency is really based upon these repeatable processes, bringing systems together and in a way that you can snap them in and out, right? This is what we’re doing in construction. It’s what you should be doing in enterprise information technology.
So, with that, I do want to thank you as always for coming out and listening to us today and talk to you next time.