Skip to main content

Transform Your DevOps and User Experiences with Latest Appian Release

Pam Benke, Senior Manager, Product Marketing
November 10, 2022

Appian 22.4 ensures all users have what they need at their fingertips.

“User experience” encompasses all aspects of the end user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”
– Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen

The above definition of user experience (UX) explains why Appian continues to be a leader and innovator in process automation. We know that it’s not just providing developers with the technology they need that’s important, but it’s also how visually appealing and easy to use those tools are. And just as important is delivering the flexibility that allows you to create apps and interfaces that delight end users.

In Appian 22.4 we address UX and customer experience (CX) with a total experience (TX) mindset—which we believe is the best way to deliver software.

The process modeler all designers need.

Let’s start with the Appian Process Modeler. It allows you to design and capture enterprise processes in workflows and add them to your applications. Users can monitor processes and change them as needed. Since this is where developers spend a majority of their time creating critical workflows and automations for your organization, why not simplify it?

With Appian 22.4, the process modeler is now a more appealing and intuitive developer experience. Featuring a new state-of-the-art look, our modernized process modeler is easier to navigate, with:

✅ Smart service icons (palette and canvas).

✅ Badge icons that represent the actor (people or machine) for a given activity. 

✅ Intermediate event/MNI decorators.

✅ Canvas, node, and connector restyling.

These new instinctual and eye-catching elements, combined with our time-tested powerful and versatile functionality, make the Appian Process Modeler the perfect place to bring humans, bots, and AI together.

And in the spirit of clarity and ease of use, in this release we’re making annotations more helpful by including annotation lines in with your process model documentation.

Process model annotations help developers understand the business context of process models, explain complex logic, and communicate with teammates.

The joy of faster Appian Portals development.

Appian Portals has revolutionized the way external web apps are created and connect even more audiences with internal business processes. Portals continues to see increased adoption in a wide variety of industries, from financial and health services to insurance, public sector, and more.

Now Appian 22.4 delivers a more powerful and intuitive Appian Portals experience for developers, making it an ideal “front door” to most applications. Deployment time is faster than ever because Appian Portals is now managed entirely within the Appian Designer. Unlike some portal solutions that are kept separate from the rest of the development platform, Appian Portals is fully unified with the Appian platform, ensuring a consistent internal and external development and deployment experience.

The new portal design object is intuitive and powerful, allowing you to easily create and configure a portal. Featuring new capabilities, including a helpful branding preview, a simple way to manage the publication status, and improved metrics, Appian Portals is a joy to use.

Appian Portals on the go.

In today’s world, digital experience must exceed the expectations of your prospects and customers. They have to be fast, easy, and mobile accessible, because we’re all on different devices throughout the day. Appian Portals, just like Appian applications, works on the go. Thanks to Appian 22.4, portals built on Appian are  seamlessly converted into Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), giving your users a convenient and easy-to-use native experience. By quickly configuring PWA settings for your portals from the new Designer interface, you can deliver a superior mobile experience. End users can start work on one device and seamlessly move to another with full capability parity across digital touchpoints.

Document viewing expands use cases.

As mentioned before, Appian Portals is ideal for a variety of industries and a vast number of use cases. Many use cases involve documents, from insurance quotes to compliance documents or enrollment forms. Viewing these documents on screen without having to download them is part of the user experience that can make or break adoption.

To address these use cases, in addition to the existing ability to upload and download documents, you can now view documents inline in your portals, too.

Driving a total experience.

As the end of the year approaches, we’re introducing Appian 22.4, the most cohesive automation platform available on the market. By putting everything under one environment and reducing the need to use web APIs, we are ensuring development, deployment, and experiences that are easy and approachable.

Appian improves customer experience and employee satisfaction every step of the way.

Test drive the entire Appian platform for free with Appian Community Edition.