Anaplan have just unveiled their new UX and iOS/Android mobile-friendly apps at the San Francisco Anaplan CPX (Connected Planning Xperience). With heightened customer expectation for new technologies to not only perform, but look and feel great, Anaplan has aimed to adapt and modernise its User Experience. However, Anaplan has also used the opportunity to add new functionality to an already very well well-stocked armoury. We’ll discuss Five of the key additions to the suite below:
1. Mobile-compatibility
We want to view and consume our data instantaneously. Anaplan’s hyperblock calculation engine has been giving us near-instantaneous, dynamically updating model data for years, but now we can also consume this data on the move. Those of you lucky enough to be at the San Francisco CPX event may have had the opportunity to get hands on with the new Android & Apple iOS compatible app. Although still in beta, this is an almightily impressive step and looks to add another feather in Anaplan’s superpowered bow. It will be interesting to see how this develops over the coming months.
2. The Geekspeak
Very briefly, in New UX language, you will be greeted by an app when you log in. An app is a series of related dashboards, or pages. A page can be a board or a worksheet. Boards are for high impact visual display, and worksheets are geared towards manipulation of data. Boards and worksheets are composed of cards. Cards hold charts, grids (tables), KPIs, images, text or actions. Cards can be resized, rearranged, and can form templates, allowing for a more consistent and familiar dashboard framework if desired. Cards can also be hyperlinked, aiding consumption of more data.
3. KPIs
When comparing the new to the old UX, we see a cleaner, more consistent page, but we are now also given the opportunity to really emphasise KPI values. Previously, KPIs could be displayed as part of a table, or KPIs in the form of line items could be pushed to the end user dashboards, and we could conditionally format these etc., but really focussing in on a specific value and bringing it to the forefront wasn’t possible. Now we can – cards can be created that maximise a KPI’s presence on a dashboard, or page, and really help to add that much needed emphasis to a key strategic metric.
4. Insights Panel – Quick Links & Additional Insights
The Insights Panel appears on the righthand side of the dashboard, or page, in the end user’s view. Here, one-click links to other pages can be embedded in the Quick Links section and cards can be added that show miniaturised graphs, grids of data, KPIs, images and actions.
5. Context Selectors
Context Selectors have taken the place of dimension dropdowns that used to sit on the top of each table/view/graph that had been published to a dashboard. These allowed you to filter data by dimension by selecting different list items – i.e. Products – while also allowing to delve deeper into a hierarchy, or conversely, zoom out and see a higher level view of the data. Now, Context Selectors perform the same function; however, they are more neatly displayed in the frozen upper right pane so there’s no more scrolling and searching for the elusive dimension dropdowns.
If your business currently takes advantage of the Anaplan platform, the new UX is available within your workspace in an early access period. To access just go to the top left 3 horizontal dashes when you first log into your Launchpad and select “New UX”, however your user must be set up with the “Page Builder” role enabled by your Anaplan Admin Team. The New UX will be in early access for the coming months as Anaplan continue to develop and add additional features to the offering. Full GA will be announced in the near future.
For further insight from Fidenda, and to see how we have incorporated some of Anaplan’s core functionality into the New UX on both traditional and the new app-based UI, come along to Fidenda stand at Anaplan CPX, London on the 1st of October 2019.
