Most enterprise software hasn’t evolved at the same rate as modern consumer software. If the applications on your phone looked anything like the majority of ERP systems, it would be unacceptable. Yet ERP users suffer every morning because they know the impending doom that faces them on their screens when they get to work.

ERP systems are supposed to help people do their job. But they don’t. They take months, if not years, to learn to use and they make the lives of users excruciatingly painful. So much so that using ERP software can actually get in the way of getting the job done. Basically, ERP sucks. So we went back to the drawing board to create an ERP system that’s a pleasure to use.

As humans, we look for cues in the world that help us figure out what to do with things. If you had never used a glove before, it would be pretty obvious that it resembled your hand and you might even try to fit it on your hand. Software is no exception. When we’re working with applications or particular interfaces, we continuously look for cues to help us understand what to do. If you’ve had any prior experience with similar objects or things, it makes it that much easier to figure out what to do.

So, we specifically designed parts of Paragon to visually resemble their counterparts in the real-world. For example, the invoicing interface looks like an invoice and a journal entry interface looks like an accounting journal. This way, you’re not working with something unfamiliar. Your experience with the concept of an invoice and how it works in the physical world informs your experience with the virtual one, making it less of a guessing game or struggle when you’re trying to figure out how to add line items to it in Paragon.

There are cues in our environment that help us understand where we are and what sort of behavior is appropriate in that context. For example, when it starts to rain, an appropriate behavior would be to take out an umbrella.

Software can be disorienting because it often lacks environmental cues, or the cues are confusing, like when you can see menu options but can’t select them.

In Paragon, we focused on making sure that the things surrounding you at any point in the software are relevant to what you are doing at that time and in that context.  Every detail of Paragon aims to tell you that something is possible on a specific screen, and more specifically, what that possibility is. So, for example, we’ve cut down the number of buttons on an interface to as little as one. We like call it this the “one button that rules them all.” It calls up only the functions that are relevant to what you are doing and what you can do next.

ERP systems are incredibly cluttered and messy, making them hard to navigate and very user-unfriendly. This is in part because of how ERP systems are traditionally built – once a core system is scoped out and built, any new functionality is just bolted on top of the core system haphazardly. Whats worse, almost 80% of the things that clutter interfaces are only used 20% of the time, so interfaces are cluttered with fields and options that you’ll only ever use once in a blue moon.

We figured there had to be a better way. So, we focused on emphasizing what is important to each user. We de-cluttered the interface by placing the most frequently used features and information on frequently used summary screens. Less frequently used information or features are accessible in the de-emphasized “more” tab. But each user still has access to everything they might need to see.

We’re not going to assume we know what features and information you need access to frequently. You know your business best, so we’ll leave those decisions up to you. When your system is set up, you’ll get to specify what goes onto summary screens and what ends up in the “more” tab. This way, Paragon’s interface is clean, less intimidating and more relevant to your business.