How UX is Beneficial for Your Company?

How UX is Beneficial for Your Company?

Previously we shared knowledge of UX fundamentals and key principles of UX, as the next part of the series, we will cover the benefits of UX.

Benefits of UX Design

A good UX boosts trust in the product which will result in revenue generation. Attention to UX design generates customer acquisition and retention.

Five lucrative benefits of good UX 

  1. UX design reduces development costs
  2. UX design increases your revenue
  3. UX design increases customer loyalty
  4. UX design stimulates word-of-mouth
  5. UX design keeps you from wasting resources

UX design reduces development costs

A user-centered approach reduces the need for design and development rework by saving time, money, and effort.

Reduced Development

UX design increases your revenue

75% of users evaluate a website based on its aesthetic appeal. A user-friendly interface that fulfills customers’ needs is more likely to convert customers.

Increases your Revenue
UX design increases customer loyalty

Positive web or mobile app usage experiences increase customer loyalty. Users become bonded to your product due to these satisfying interactions, and they continue to use it.

Customer Loyalty

UX design stimulates word-of-mouth

Word-of-mouth advertising occurs when people promote your goods purely out of their own volition and without being compensated for it.

Word of Mouth

UX design keeps you from wasting resources

You may save time, money, and human resources by investing in superior UX design solutions. Hiring sales representatives and marketers to advertise a product without spending money on an engaging user experience is one example of resource mismanagement.

Save Time

An investment in superior UX design proves to be super beneficial. At ContCentric, we have a team of experienced UX designers to make a super easy digital transformation journey for our clients. Reach out to us for a free consultation or hire a designer to remove the design bottlenecks at the early stage of the design and development process.

Online Form Builder with Alfresco

A number of official communications happen on day to day basis within enterprises which are form based. These are an integral aspect of the Document Management System of the organization. There will be more than one internal or external stakeholders involved while that communication is being distributed across the channel. Some of such communications could be:

1] IT request forms

2] Leave request forms

3] Vendor register

4] Asset specification forms

5] Feedback form for training sessions

6] Employee detail forms

7] QA form

8] Product batch forms

9] Customer information form

10] Checklists for various processes

It is observed that only some companies handle the forms through their Document Management System. More often, there are physical forms/ print-outs which flow around, to say the least. The physical forms have severe limitations and challenges.

Read Alfresco development related blog: Edit Documents Online (ONLYOFFICE Integration)

Common Challenges for Enterprises to Handle Physical Forms:

1] Inefficiency in Tracking Physical Forms: Many of these forms used in the paper format where the employees would take a print of a prescribed form, will fill up with a pen to physically submit it for the approval. The physical paper-trail will lead to inefficiency as there is no system available to track the form.

2] Difficulties in Search Retrieval: The physical forms are stored at separate locations after the process is over. Retrieving the forms for audit or any other query is time-consuming. It may also happen that the physical form is misplaced.

3] Time & Cost Implications: The physical forms take time to pass through the persons involved. The paper cost is also a factor. The storage space and retrieval of the physical document is also a hidden cost.

4] No Analytics: It will be close to impossible to do any analysis on any form type. If the numbers and pattern are not clear, it is difficult to improve the business.

Online Form Builder with Alfresco:

As an Alfresco development company, we have leveraged the Alfresco Enterprise Content Management platform to derive a solution which comes up with a custom form builder where the authorized users can build a form of their choice without coding a single line. The online forms are not readily available in the standard Alfresco installation but we have developed the same through customization. Speaking a bit technical, In Alfresco, forms can be configured in share-custom-config.xml or form-config.xml files, and it requires the intervention of Administrators/Developers, as users cannot configure it.

With our customs form builder solution, no Alfresco development knowledge required to create the forms. It is very simple to build. As shown in the diagram, one needs to create the form type, give the title, build it using different field options like text area, drop down fields, check-boxes, radio buttons, action buttons etc. We can make any field mandatory or optional while preparing the same. Once the format is ready, it can be made available for the users to initiate a process. A response can be collected in form of a document as well as the customized and automated folder structure.

alfresco-form-builder

Why Alfresco for Online Form Builder:

1] Improved Information Capturing: Users fill the information in the available structure only. The information uniformity is maintained. There are reduced chances of human error which occur in the physical forms.

2] Workflow Capabilities: Alfresco has a strong case to cater to Business Process Management. We can create workflows in Alfresco as per the business processes. The user can attach the form to a particular workflow which will proceed to the next user groups as defined.

3] Task Notifications and Reminders: The form submission will be notified to the relevant users within the system. We can also include email notifications. We can set up the reminders if there is no action taken within a prescribed time. That expedites the flow of information within the organization.

4] Digital Signature: Some processes require the form to be signed. Implementing digital signature or electronic signature capabilities addresses the problem with ease.

5] Indexing of the data: We can capture the form fields as metadata and can index them in the system. The indexing can be used in creating a structured approach to the Alfresco document management.

6] Advanced Search: The search is probably the most powerful facility. We can search it using the title, content, metadata, user involved, date of creation or modification etc. This saves a lot of time otherwise being spent in mundane search of physical forms in store-rooms.

So, if your organization is looking for this kind of solution, do contact us. We will understand the depth you require around the use cases and will deliver a solution of your needs.

Thanks for reading this blog!

Configuring OCR in Alfresco

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the recognition of printed or written text characters by a computer. It recognizes the characters from the images or scanned documents, and that makes the images (which contain text) searchable. OCR is a very useful feature for any ECM product or software. In this blog, we will see how we can configure it in Alfresco Community Edition. We have tested this with Alfresco versions 5.1.f and 5.2.e. It should also work with other nearby versions.

Read the blog for OCR in Alfresco [Video]

Prerequisites:ocr-magnifying-glass

  1. Alfresco Community / Enterprise Edition installed and running
  2. Basic knowledge of Alfresco administration

Steps to Configure Tesseract:

1. Download Tesseract and install
Linux:

apt-get install tesseract-ocr

2. Stop the alfresco tomcat server

./alfresco.sh stop tomcat

3. Download the Linux /Windows context file and place at

<ALFRESCO-HOME>/tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/

 

4. Place ocr.bat(Windows) and ocr.sh(Linux) at <ALFRESCO-HOME>/

a) ocr.bat (for Windows)

REM to see what happens
mkdir c:\tmp
echo from %1 to %2 >> C:\\tmp\ocrtransform.log
copy /Y %1 "C:\TMP\%~n1%~x1"
echo target %~d2%~p2%~n2
REM call tesseract and redirect output to $TARGET
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Tesseract-OCR\tesseract.exe" "C:\tmp\%~n1%~x1" "%~d2%~p2%~n2" -l eng

b) ocr.sh (for Linux)

# save arguments to variables
SOURCE=$1
TARGET=$2
TMPDIR=/tmp/Tesseract
FILENAME=`basename $SOURCE`
OCRFILE=$FILENAME.tif
# Create temp directory if it doesn't exist
sudo mkdir -p $TMPDIR
# to see what happens
#echo "from $SOURCE to $TARGET" >>/tmp/ocrtransform.log
sudo cp -f $SOURCE $TMPDIR/$OCRFILE
# call tesseract and redirect output to $TARGET
sudo /usr/local/bin/tesseract $TMPDIR/$OCRFILE ${TARGET%\.*} -l eng
#sudo tesseract $TMPDIR/$OCRFILE ${TARGET%\.*} -l eng
sudo rm -f $TMPDIR/$OCRFILE

Note: Make sure that the path for tesseract command is correct in the ocr.sh / ocr.bat file
Linux:

/usr/local/bin or /usr/bin

Windows:

C:\Program Files(x86)\Tesseract-ocr\tesseract.exe
or C:\Program Files\Tesseract-ocr\tesseract.exe

5. If the current user does not have read or execute permissions on ocr.sh then give it.

chmod +rx /opt/<ALFRESCO-HOME>/ocr.sh

6. Add following properties in the alfresco-global.properties file located at

<ALFRESCO-HOME>/tomcat/shared/classes/

Linux:

ocr.script=/opt/<ALFRESCO-HOME>/ocr.sh
ghostscript.exe=gs

Windows:

ocr.script=C:\<ALFRESCO-HOME>\ocr.bat
ghostscript.exe=gs

7. Start tomcat server
Linux:

./alfresco.sh start tomcat

Windows:

C:\<ALFRESCO-HOME>\tomcat\bin\startup.bat press enter.
Or use manager-windows.exe

Note: Existing files in alfresco will not be OCRed, you have to upload new image files to test.

Important:

  1. Make sure you are passing correct arguments in the context file (Entries in context files will be  different for Windows and Linux).
  2. Check whether your .bat or .sh commands are properly working or not
  3. Verify that tesseract creates text file for the image file
    1. To verify that go to the directory where tesseract is installed and run the following command
    2. tesseract ./<image file-name> ./<text file-name> -l eng

If the text file is created with content in it, your tesseract is working.

Comment here, if your contents are still not searchable. We are happy to know your ECM challenges, as we love solving them Contact us!

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