10 Heuristics for Designing Administrative User Interfaces – A Collaboration Between Ethnography, Design, and Engineering

Abstract

The lack of focus on administrative interfaces often comes from management’s mandate to prioritize end user screens ahead of others. This often shortchanges a more technical class of users with unique needs and requirements. At Oracle, design heuristics for admininstrative GUIs were sourced from a multitude of sources in the corporate ecosystem. Ethnographers, software architects, designers, and the administrators themselves all contributed to bring a better understanding of this often forgotten class of user. Administrators were found to inhabit anywhere from two to five particular classifications, depending on the size of the company. Recently, an ethnographer studied one classification in greater detail, the Database Administrator, while a designer, in the course of an E-Business Suite Installer project analyzed another, the application administrator. What emerged based on the gathered data was a remarkably consistent and universal set of rules and tools that can be used to lower the total cost of ownership and increase usability, attractiveness, and satisfaction for administrative interfaces.