Implement SaaSification techniques when building your user interface

  • 12 minutes

SaaSification techniques you should implement include the following techniques.

  • Assisted setup - To help you get ready for doing business, you can visit the Assisted Setup page, where you can launch assisted setup guides, videos, or help topics for selected setup tasks.

  • Wizards - A wizard page enables a user to easily setup a part of Business Central. The wizard consists out of several pages that help the user in an intuitive way to navigate over an otherwise complex setup.

    The user assistance concept of Get Started isn't just about getting started with Business Central on the first day. It's also about getting started all the other days, and about getting started with infrequent and unfamiliar tasks.

    Assistance in the shape of wizards is very helpful for setting things up, or filling in data for a complicated report, for example. Designing Home pages that are truly designed for that particular role or job is also very useful in helping users get started with their work every day. They can easily get to their most important tasks, which means that Business Central helps them get their work done more efficiently.

  • Notifications - Notifications provide a programmatic way to send non-intrusive information to the User Interface (UI) in the Web client. Notifications differ from messages initiated by the MESSAGE method. Messages are modal, which means users are typically required to address the message, and take some form of corrective action before they can continue working.

    On the other hand, some notifications are non-modal. Their purpose is to give users information about a current situation, but don't require any immediate action, or block users from continuing with their current task. For example, you could have a notification that a customer's credit limit is exceeded.

  • Application areas - Application areas represent a feature in the system that offers developers, administrators, and users the ability to define differentiated user experiences. Application areas are mapped to controls to show or hide them on page objects, to enable more or fewer business scenarios.

  • Tooltips - Even the best designed user interface can still be confusing to some. It can be difficult to predict what users will find confusing, and that's why the base application includes descriptions for all controls and actions that can be accessed when you select the caption of the control or action. In combination with descriptive captions and instructional text, these tooltips, or callouts, are the current implementation of embedded user assistance, which is an important principle in today's world of software design.

    The tooltips help users unblock themselves by providing an answer to the most likely questions the users might have, such as "What data can I input here?" or "What is the data used for?" Keep that in mind when you develop the user interface of your solution.

  • Customizing the User Interface for User Roles - The strength of Business Central is its role-tailored experience that helps users focus on the work that is important to them. Business Central offers several features for developers, application administrators, and end-users, that can be used to customize the pages that users work with in the client.

    The Role Center is the first layer of customization. The Role Center is the user's entry point and home page for Business Central. It displays information that is pertinent to the user's role in the company, and enables them to easily navigate to relevant pages for viewing data and performing tasks. You can develop several different Role Centers, where each Role Center is customized to the profile of the intended users.

To learn more about assisted setup, please have a look at the following modules.

To learn more about building pages and wizards, please have a look at the following modules.

To learn more about notifications, please have a look at the following modules.

To learn more about application areas, please have a look at the following documentation.

To learn more about tooltips, please have a look at the following documentation.

To learn more about customizing the user interface for user roles, please have a look at the following learning path and documentation pages.