Anaplan's New User Experience Designed for Optimal Planning

Mark_W_Shemaria

Have you heard? Anaplan’s user experience is evolving. With a laser focus on the customer journey, Anaplan's New User Experience (NUX) is designed to make users’ lives easier by helping their business to run more smoothly and catering to better planning and decision making.

The NUX is currently available in the platform. With upcoming features being added regularly, Anaplan’s look, feel, and functionality will continually be enhanced. The features of the NUX that enhance the original/classic dashboarding experience within Anaplan are covered in this post.

Highlights

There’s no shortage of updates with the NUX. To get started, here are a few highlights:

• New experience layer: Includes apps and pages.
• Intuitive design: Caters to model builders and end users alike.
• Accessible: Now available from any device.
• Best practices: Designed to encourage usage in the best way possible.
• Designed for the future: Creating a foundation for further capabilities.

 Three Key Benefits

1. Apps access multiple models, via pages.
2. Generic device display access (e.g. computer, large screens, tablets, and handheld devices).
3. NUX accessed separately from the model(s).

NUX Personas

The Anaplan journey accommodates a wide variety of end users by linking pages to quick insights and presenting data in easily digestible chunks, while also ensuring that navigation throughout the process is smooth and intuitive. No matter how you use Anaplan as an end user, the NUX is designed to accommodate your experience. Whether you’re a project executive sponsor, a platform administrator, or a model builder, the NUX was created with your individual experience in mind.

Here are some examples of the personas the NUX is designed to accommodate:

• Executive: Summary level, quick answers to critical metrics across connected use cases.
• Planner: Inputs plan structures and metrics.
• Reviewer: Reviews and approves inputs collaboratively.
• Application builder: Designs and assembles end-to-end processes reflected in the applications, which reflect the goals of all user stories.

Page Builder Role

Page builders assemble pages from models

The NUX introduces the role of “page builder” to the Anaplan platform. This role is assigned by the administrator of the tenant. Page builders do the behind-the-scenes building of user pages and don’t need to have extensive model- building experience or responsibilities. Page builders will assemble pages from models to create applications accessed by end users. Then, end users will be able to view, edit, and use their data for planning and decision-making activities as allowed by their role in the underlying Anaplan model.

More About the New User Experience:

• Your New User Experience
• Introducing Your New Anaplan Experience
• Anaplan's New UX is in Open Early Access

Extended User Experience

The Anaplan Way is a process structure built around concepts of use cases—sometimes synonymous with model and user stories. The classic definition of a user story is defined by the “who,” “what,” and “how” of individual use within the Anaplan platform.

The NUX continues to focus on The Anaplan Way—while also extending the user experience. All the functionality of the Anaplan classic look and feel is also being replicated in the NUX.

Below is a brief comparison of classic Anaplan and the NUX features:

Classic	NUX	Notes
Model	Application	NUX application sourced from multiple models vs. one model.
Dashboard	Page	Pages replace dashboards.
Graph	Graph	Enhanced capabilities.
Grid/Module	Worksheet	New specific features.
Functional Area	Categories	Groupings of pages.
N/A	Cards Templates	Reusable dashboard elements.
N/A	KPI Cards	Focused metric to highlight a page.

The NUX will respect the user roles, selective access, and dynamic cell access established in the Anaplan model. This ensures that the NUX provides information that the end user has permission to access in the underlying models.

The NUX will continue to evolve and expand in the weeks ahead. Stay current on the latest NUX happenings by subscribing to the blog. What are your thoughts on the NUX? Share your feedback in the comments below.

AnyaS

Ability of the app to have pages based off multiple models can be very valuable. Staying tuned for futher functionality and design options enhancements! Would be curious to see how Anaplan-on-Anaplan is starting to utilize new UX!

saurabh.raheja

Delete Branch action is not currently available in the list of actions provided in the New UX. It would be very helpful to have this action to migrate the current Classic UX Input dashboards into New UX board/worksheets.