If you attended Anaplan's CPX conference last year, you've probably already heard about and seen Anaplan's New User Experience (New UX). After seeing a demo or two of what is possible with the New UX, you are likely wondering, “what else do I need to know before implementing the New UX?” To help shed light on this, we've outlined answers to the questions we’ve heard about transitioning to Anaplan's New UX.
Where do I start?
All Anaplan customers have access to build in the New UX. All you need is to designate a Tenant Admin who will be able to assign the Page Builder role to your model builder(s) or superuser(s). A Tenant Admin will have access to view a list of all workspaces under your customer tenant, model names, and users at your company. You can have more than one Tenant Admin per customer. (Read more about how to assign page builder access.) Not sure if you have a Tenant Admin? Reach out to your Spaulding Ridge project lead.
Can I flip my existing models into the New UX to try it out and change back if I don't like it?
Unlike Salesforce Classic to Lightning, the New UX is not quite as simple as a flip of a switch. Updating to the New UX requires dashboards to be rebuilt leveraging your existing models. While this is extra work upfront, it presents a great opportunity to revisit the user experience for each persona and optimize the overall flow and ease of use of your dashboards.
This approach allows you to have classic and New UX dashboards running in parallel, which can be beneficial if some personas will remain in the classic view (e.g. workspace or model admin).
What are the key benefits of using the New UX?
Everything built in the New UX is automatically accessible on a phone or tablet! No additional work is needed. If your end users are planning to access apps from a mobile device, your page builders will want to consider this during the implementation to ensure pages are built with the mobile experience in mind and plan for mobile testing. Generally, on the Anaplan app, there will be one card displayed at a time (depending on the device).
Dashboards in the classic user experience tend to get cluttered. Board pages in the New UX are built based on placing several cards, each being a grid, chart, text box, or action button, onto the page. The cards all auto-align themselves, keeping the overall look of the page clean and organized.
In the New UX, the experience is no longer limited to one model at a time. Users that work with multiple models can have custom apps that seamlessly link pages with elements from any model across any workspaces they have access to. This is especially beneficial for users that are involved in multiple planning and forecasting processes that leverage Anaplan.
If you loved personal saved dashboards, you will also love My Pages. With My Pages, all end users can customize their own experience without interfering with other users’ experiences. Similar to personal saved dashboards, you can build on an existing page or start from scratch.
Card templates allow page builders to save specific configurations of a card in a library to be reused on other pages without needing to start over. This is especially useful to reduce build time for models with multiple types of roles. Users may need to see the same data but on personalized dashboards for their roles. Card templates are also very helpful for end users to create My Pages, without needing to know which saved view to pull from or how to set up cards from scratch.
This is too good. What do I need to consider before implementing the new UX?
What pain points have the New UX addressed from the Classic UX?
1. Simplified Layout.
2. End-User Customization.
3. Connected Planning.
The New UX opens a world of possibilities for end users to interact with their Anaplan models. This is a great opportunity for current customers to reinvent the user experience and for new customers to get ahead on planning what they want in their user experience. Although this update will require re-building existing dashboards and re-training of users, these additional efforts should not deter you from deciding to implement your models in the New UX. Setting aside time to plan for optimizing your end users’ use of the tool will make a big difference in the smoothness of your model development and roll-out.
Your partners at Spaulding Ridge are always committed to helping clients unlock the value of new functionality in the technology you’ve invested in. If you are considering transitioning to Anaplan's New UX, ask us how these changes benefit your organization and the considerations that should be included in your implementation plan. Contact us at info@spauldingridge.com.
Do you have a favorite benefit of the New UX? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Then, check out these great discussions about the New UX happening in Community now.
Angela Breard-Chen, Analyst at Spaulding Ridge, LLC.Angela Breard-Chen is a certified Anaplan model builder and an Analyst in the Performance Management practice of Spaulding Ridge, LLC. Angela has experience in Sales Forecasting and Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) and aims to apply both creativity and best practices to provide valuable and well-tailored solutions to her clients.
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