Take the Tour
July 15th, 2010 by hildadavies
I have been asked to review the new “Take the Tour” for Policy Manager
For quite a while now, Claromentis has provided a place for visitors to have a play with Claromentis applications through our demo site. This works really well for some products, such as Intranet/Extranet manager, where features are intuitive and straightforward for users to try out. For other products though, not so straightforward.
I was therefore quite excited to be ask to review our first attempt to produce “Take the Tour” to explain about our Policy Manager product.
Here are some comments that I can share, please feel free to agree or disagree.
- Loading Time – I first attempted to review the tour from a pub in our local village, via iPad, and found response times quite slow when loading the diagrams within the page. Even though in this occassion, the one to blame is the poor 3G reception, I think it is worth noting, though, that visitors would be discouraged if the tour takes too long to load.
- Navigation within the Tour – The next thing which strikes me was where to start. Where should I begin, top left corner? In this toour I was presented with a well laid out screenshots of the application, with explanations about different components within each snapshot, however I am stil lost. As a visitor, I would like to be guided with simple numbering which would give me the assurance that I am navigating correctly, and would guide me through a logical order of explanation of the relevant features
- Videos – If we need to add videos in order to explain some features better, keep each video as concise and short as possible, and no music, please ….
Personally, I think something like our “Why Choose Claromentis” tour is simple, informative and very easy to use. It’s also very iPhone/iPad friendly. See here… http://www.claromentis.com/why/
I really like the concept of showing the different screens of the applications, but I would expect to see less content. I think 11 screens is perhaps a little too much to give me an over-view of the application. If I really want to drill into that level of detail, I would expect to have a personal and guided tour by a sales rep. And on that note, at the end of the tour, who should I contact and how? We don’t appear to be advertising the fact that we would love the opportunity to give someone a personal tour and working examples of the application.
In conclusion, I like the concept of the tour, but the navigation wasn’t as friendly as I think it could be, and there was a little too much content for my liking.
ORACLE have a great example of how to give a product tour here…
http://www.oracle.com/pls/ebn/swf_viewer.load?p_shows_id=6608854&p_referred=undefined&p_width=800&p_height=600
They focus on not just what the application is called and how it works, but what it’s designed for, how organizations can benefit from using it, what individuals can benefit from using it and how they can use it. what returns it can bring to the organization and which business challenges it provides solutions for.
I know it’s an ambitious goal, but if we could even get close to this quality, I think we could really showcase the power of the applications that Claromentis offers.
And did I mention that Claromentis is one of few Oracle Intranet Solutions available on the market?
But it also runs on MSSQL or MySQL – Providing choice to the customer is one of our Core Values.
http://www.claromentis.com/company/