Anna Budovsky, User Experience Principal Designer, Applications User Experience

In PeopleSoft we strive to improve User Experience on all levels. Simplifying navigation and streamlining access to the most important pages is always an important goal.

No one likes to waste time waiting for pages to load and watching a spinning glass going on and on. Those performance-affecting server trips, page-load waits and just-too-many clicks were complained about for a long time.

Something had to be done. A few new designs came in PeopleSoft 9.2 helping users to access their everyday work areas easier and faster. For example, Dashboard and Work Center aggregate most accessed information sections on a single page; Related Information allows users to complete transaction-related-research without interrupting a transaction and Secure Search gets users to a specific page directly.

Today we’ll talk about the Actions menu. Most PeopleSoft pages are shared between individual products and product lines. It means changing the content on a single page involves Oracle development and quality assurance time for making and testing the changes.

In order to streamline the navigation and cut down on accessing PeopleSoft pages one-page-at-a-time, we introduced a new menu design. The new menu allows accessing shared pages without the Oracle development team making any local changes, and it works as an additional one-click-path to specific high-traffic actionable pages.

Let’s look at how many steps it took to Change Salary for an employee in HCM 9.1 before:

Figure 1. BEFORE: The 6 steps a user would take to Change Salary in PeopleSoft HCM 9.1

In PeopleSoft 9.1 it took 5 steps + page loading time + additional verification time for making sure a correct employee is selected from the table.

In PeopleSoft 9.2 it only takes 2 steps. To complete Ad Hoc Change Salary action, the user can start from the HCM Manager's Dashboard, click the Action menu within a table, choose a menu option, and access a correct employee’s details page to take an action.

Figure 2. AFTER: The 2 steps a user would take to Change Salary in PeopleSoft HCM 9.2

The new menu is placed on a row level which ensures the user accesses the correct employee’s details page. The Actions menu separates menu options into hierarchical sections which help to scan and access the correct option quickly. The new menu’s small size and its structure enabled users to access high-traffic pages from any page and from any part of the page.

No more spinning hourglass, no more multiple pages upload. The flexible design fits anywhere on a page and provides a fast and reliable path to the correct destination within the product.

Now users can:

1. Access any target page no matter how far it is buried from the starting point;
2. Reduce navigation and page-load time;
3. Improve productivity and reduce errors.

The new menu design is available and widely used in all PeopleSoft 9.2 product lines.