Siemens UX Diagnostic

Siemens PLM Software is a business unit of Siemens, specializing in product lifecycle management software called Teamcenter.

Overview

While working at customer sites I began compiling a list of usability issues with Teamcenter. I then decided to run a more comprehensive UX diagnostic on the software.

Results

  • Because Teamcenter design drew elements from multiple software areas, had aquired other applications over the years, and was incredibly feature rich, many common UX principles such as error prevention, consistency, etc. were missing.
  • Some issues would be easy to fix, such as creating consistency between applications with common icons and diction for buttons.
  • Other issues would be more difficult, such as different methodologies for accomplishing tasks between applications.
  • The diagnostic provided a good place to start with 44 pages of resources, screenshots, and methods provided. 65 issues were identified with 20 proposed solutions.

Issues Documented

Solutions Proposed

Usability Diagnostic

There’s a sweet spot around 5 users that provides a solid cross section of usability errors without being prohibitively expensive.

Shortcuts

Teamcenter provides several shortcuts, but they don’t match up with what users expect. CTRL+P starts a workflow, CTRL+T creates an item, CTRL+M creates a form, etc.

Hidden Buttons

Because of the way the icons are shaped, they do not appear to afford clicking, so the error message is never seen.

Error Messages

One of the areas Teamcenter fell short was in their error messaging department. They often had messages that meant nothing to users, or worse were blank.