Dynamics AX has been down the dashboard road before. Role centers were introduced in AX 2009 and carried forward into AX 2012, but never really found traction. The new Dynamics AX (v7) fundamentally shifts what the dashboard concept means; take a fresh look at Workspace design.
What is a Workspace
Microsoft defines a Workspace as
A way to provide an initial overview and to increase productivity in the activity by allowing simple tasks to be completed directly in the workspace.
This is a major change from prior versions of AX; a Workspace is now a task center not a role center. Anticipate users having access to multiple workspaces, and using the one that best fits the activity at hand.
I was an accountant in a previous life, so I’ll use that role as an example. Consider the activities an accountant does:
- Month end closing
- Journal entries
- Wear a funny green visor
Does the accountant really want to create journal entries at the same time their attention is focused on month end tasks that are past due? (Hint: No.) Consider first the activities of a role, then group related tasks into a Workspace.
What’s in a Workspace
Once the scope of a Workspace is defined, tasks should be broken down into standard sections.
- Buttons to add new information.
- Tiles to surface critical tasks and to-dos.
- List pages with commonly accessed records and buttons.
- Charts and PowerBI reports to review historical trends.
- Links to favorite forms.
The immediateness of information should be presented from left to right and top to bottom. Buttons and tiles are for tasks to address each time the Workspace is opened. List pages quickly drill into a multitude of forms. Charts and BI are periodically reviewed to investigate trends. Links are default favorites for commonly used forms.
If You Build Tiles, They Will Come
To get users excited about workspaces, compelling tiles are the selling point. Tiles must surface information users wouldn’t already know but want to know. Here are some tips for creating good tiles.
Be specific
Users want to know what they need to do, not all the work that needs to be done. Menu items with “My” in the title can easily be the starting point for great tiles.
Take action
Getting people to come back to a workspace is achieved by letting them know where additional action needs to be taken. The simplest example is displaying the number of pending approvals in workflow. Other things may be date driven, such as Purchase order lines that where the delivery is past due. Perhaps there are things a user needs to keep an eye on, like unposted journals or source documents.
Knowing what open issues to address will increase the frequency a user will visit the Workspace.
Prioritize
Put the tiles in order of most urgent to least urgent. Since languages are commonly written left to right, the natural tendency is for the eye to start at the top left corner and work into the page from there.
Considerations for Other Sections
List pages
List pages allow contextual buttons that get the user into a specific form quickly. So the most important part of these pages is determining what are the most common buttons on each form the user wants to access.
Pretty stuff
Charts, APIs, and other visualizations are easy to demo but difficult to implement. Visualization design should begin with interviewing users and understanding their current decision making process. The parameters around that decision can then be surfaced so they can more quickly recognize and investigate issues.
Links
Put in the links section menu items a typical user would tag as a Favorite.
Gamification
The term gamification means awarding electronic certificates after a participant has earned a certain number of points. Remember in elementary school when the teacher would put a gold star sticker on your homework when you did a good job – that is an example of gamification.
This concept could work well for Employee centered Workspaces. Here are some examples of badges that could be given out:
- A Sales order processor entered 10,000 order lines.
- A Timesheet worker submitted 52 timesheets in a row on time.
- An accountant literally wears a green visor.
Now let’s go make some awesome experiences.
