4 years ago when my old Nokia 6310i brick finally gave up the ghost I spent some time convincing Orange to replace it with one the same.

She kept asking me silly questions like “what do you use your phone for?” – phone calls of course!

The 6320i and its predecessors were great phones.  My wife still has my old one.  The battery simply never runs out.  About 6 months ago she changed car and so the hands free kit was lost and she had no charger.  It took me about a month to remember to bring one home from work.  During that time the battery went from 6 bars to 5.

They were also pretty indestructible.  I know this as previously a typical phone would last me 9 months before I broke it.  Stepped on it, dropped it, cycled over it, fell out of a boat with it.  The Nokia just kept on going.

However, all good things come to an end.  I wanted mobile email.

So – we renewed our business plan and I got a HTC running windows mobile.  Email on it great – outlook – exactly the same as I’ve been using on my desktop for 10 years.

More recently I’ve noticed that its taking over my life – it now has twitter, google, youtube, google maps.  This year we even used it to navigate around Paris – though I’m going to have to hide the data bill from the accountant.

So – I decided it would be handy if I could blog from it.  Sure, I could use the web browser but its a bit cumbersome.  All the blogs I work on sit on the DotNetNuke platform.  The DotNetNuke platform supports a blogging standard called MetaWebLog.  Not sure where this standard comes from but it seems to work fine with Windows Live Writer – which is what I’m using now.

So I googled and tried a few apps.

Moblog

“moBlog currently supports Blogger, Wordpress.com and Live Spaces. Support for LiveJournal and MovableType/TypePad is also on the cards.”

 

Not much good for me then as I need “MetaWebLog”.

Maybe one of these is it – so I had a look on wikipedia and it told me live spaces used it.  I started to set up a blog as a live space blog.  Scrolled the input screen to the bottom and when I popped up the on screen keyboard it covered half the input boxes.  Not good.  Tried with keyboard but settings just didn’t seem to match what I wanted.

Verdict.

There only seems to be a couple of standards – maybe the writers should concentrate on these rather than specific blog providers.

UI seems to need a bit of polish.

Writer for Windows Mobile

First thing strange about this was that it does not come as a cab file but a zip file.  You simple unzip the directory onto your mobile.

Not sure how easy this is for those without a pc handy.

Set up the blog and tried to publish.  Not really sure if it worked or not – checked online – nothing there.

Verdict

Needs to tell you what’s going on.

Only supports one type.

Didn’t seem to be able to download.

Couldn’t get it to work.

TBlogger

Installed and setup fairly easily.  Only slight gripe was I couldn’t paste in urls to the text boxes.  Took me a while to find my blogid – but it was in the url the whole time.  This is not really a gripe with TBlogger but more with my head.

It successfully synced with all my blogs – downloading a local copy – so things were looking promising.

So – I tried to publish a blog but got an error – “Failed to create or amend item: quick test(): request contains boolean value when integer expected[request:parameter …”

Not sure if this a general issues or maybe a problem with DotNetNuke.  However, I do know that Windows Live Writer works fine.

I was able to edit an existing blog without any problems.

Verdict

Seemed to be very promising.  I was particularly impressed with being able to do a full sync from my blogs.  However, needs fixing and I have yet to receive a reply to my post on the home page.

Overall Verdict

No success.  Perhaps Microsoft will do a Windows Live Writer for Windows Mobile.

Of the 3 I looked at – TBlogger was certainly the most complete.

Perhaps I should get a life.

My sales team and users are constantly telling me to keep Fusion Accounts easy to use.  They also want more and more functionality.  So they want easy complexity.  The WII successfully implements two principles that we try to adhere to in the design of Fusion Accounts.

KISS

The first is the age old KISS principle.  KISS = Keep It Simple Stupid or as Albert Einstein put it "everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler".

Technologists such as myself love to use the latest “Whiz Bang” technologies.  What we often fail to forget is that users want things easier and don’t care what technology is used.  As part of our recent website revamp we asked all our employees to list there favourite website and explain why they liked them so much.

Without exception they listed sites such as Google, Gumtree and Easyjet as not only being great as they did what they wanted them to do but also because they did it in an uncluttered and simple way.

Google has to be the best example of the KISS principle.

“Old” internet users like me remember in the “early” internet days there was Netscape’s guide to the internet and  Yahoo had a category listings pages that were manually maintained.  Then in 1995 came AltaVista from DEC – which was a proper web crawler that indexed pages. It had a search.

Then along comes Google – which had one text box and a search button.  Ok – now behind the front page there is lots of other stuff Google can do for you and their business model and tools for paid advertising are great but I think what really made Google so popular was its simplicity.  And today the main page still features a text box and a search button.

In developing Fusion Accounts we have tried to adhere to this principle – but it is difficult.  Accounts have much more than one box!

So – we have tried to make each part of the system show just enough detail to allow the user to do what they need to do with extra bangs and whistles available to the advanced user.  We feel we have succeeded well in this, our users tell us they prefer it to other systems that they used to use – but we know new users who have not used any accounting systems before can find some of the concepts tricky.

Luckily as an online provider we are able to implement continuous improvements from user feedback.

The Principle Of Least Surprise or Astonishment

“In user interface design, programming language design, and ergonomics, the principle (or rule or law) of least astonishment (or surprise) states that, when two elements of an interface conflict, or are ambiguous, the behaviour should be that which will least surprise the human user or programmer at the time the conflict arises.”

My 3 year old daughter can use the WII!

The WII’s user interface uses big buttons.  It is uncluttered and there are always only a few choices.  If you need to do something in you can’t continue until you have done it.

The layout of each page is consistent, the options are consistent, the buttons to push are consistent.

This is quite difficult to apply.  One of the “Surprises” that we are currently addressing in Fusion Accounts is the use of negative numbers.  Most people know what a negative number is but it seems to surprise accountants who are much happier with credits and debits or brackets to indicate numbers less than zero.

So we have to consider who it is we want not to surprise.  Sometimes this provides us with a dilemma.  Our user’s who are accountants and bookkeepers  like to see codes for nominal accounts.  For example, when recording a payment for electricity then want to type a code for electricity.

To give least surprise we have used similar codes to Sage – so accountants are familiar with these.

Businesses users though are generally not used to Sage and do not know these codes.  They just want to say the payment was for Electricity.

We are currently making how the Nominal Account (payment category) is selected a user option.  We just need to make sure the number of user options does not break the KISS principle!

There seems to be to be a lot of debate around weather SaaS is all just hype or will displace traditional installed software. I personally think the question should be how long will it take!

16 years ago I was working as a software developer technology company called Pilkington Microelectronics.  We had an internet connection!  I know that's nothing extraordinary today but in 1993 most people in the UK had never heard of the internet.  In fact, I beleive our connection (a dial up modem) was installed by one of the Co-Founders of Demon Internet, the first Internet Service Provider in the United Kingdom for individual subscribers which was sold to Scottish Telecom in 1998 for (UKP) £66M.

One day I tried to look for a flight or a holiday online.  I searched in Alta Vista (I think or could have been netscapes own search engine) - this was pre Google.  You may find it amazing but I could not find a single airline or travel agent online!  The only information I could find was some sort of link to an Apollo gatwway which squirted out scheduled flight times.

Do a search for flights today and you'll find a different story!

So what's this got to do with SaaS or accountancy?

Well - I beleive that the exact same drivers that applied to the airline industry 15 years ago still apply.  What the internet did for the airline industry is cut out the desktop software of the travel agent and its processeing and allow them to provide a direct channel to their customers.

Do you really think in 5 years time any of the software vendors are going to want to be putting together download pathces or CD's for the myriads of sofware they produce?

Do you really think that businesses big and small want to carry on paying highly skilled IT staff to keep their own sytems standing still?

Do you really think that in 5 years time accountants are going to want to have every version of Sage installed on a PC somewhere so they can look at their clients accounts?

Do you really think in 5 years time people will still be tied to their office PC to do their work?

Anyone working corporate or public sector organisations today will notice that all of their in-house software is on their intranet - why - because even within an organisation the cost of support of desktop software is just prohibitive.

And that's really what it boils down to.  The reason SaaS is here to stay is because it's cheaper.  Cheaper for the vendor because they can support it and cheaper for the buyer because they don't have to.