iDempiere enthusiasts share many examples of how iDempiere changed people’s lives for the better. Here we present to you our hero of the month for his contributions.

We are proud to recognize Réka Bede as iDempiere’s Hero of the Month! As a talented UX/UI designer, Reka has made a significant impact on the iDempiere community. She played a key role in organizing the iDempiere Conference in Budapest and delivered an insightful session on enhancing user experience within the platform. Her contributions didn’t stop there—she also led a dynamic brainstorming workshop that helped shape a clearer vision of the project and its evolving needs. Thank you, Reka, for your creativity, leadership, and dedication to making iDempiere more user-friendly and future-ready!

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Tell us a little bit about your childhood and where you grew up.

I grew up in Slovakia. I liked to do creative things, draw and watch detective series.

What sparked your interest in design and user experience?

I always enjoyed creative and analytical things at the same time. When thinking about my career I didn’t want to limit myself only to one of them and digital product design covered both. What I like is that it is dynamic, sometimes more creativity, sometimes more analytical thinking.

How long have you been involved with iDempiere?

I got involved recently with the iDempiere Conference organisation in Budapest. However, while designing for front-end solutions based on iDempiere I also had to understand how the software works and use it on some testing or daily tasks internally.

When working with clients or teams on iDempiere, what are the most common UX/UI challenges you encounter?

The navigation questions, where can I find this/that, it doesn’t look good, hard learning time – I forgot the last time you explained how to do this – can you tell me again, I have to do too many clicks to finish a task. Most importantly, on-boarding of new users can be problematic. There is a long learning curve and, as discussed on the conference, the users are changing, so it’s good to adopt some changes.

What are some of the things you would like to improve in iDempiere (in general)?

I don’t think making the UI “sexy” is what should be in focus. I think the software is good to use if it is built using best practices, consistency and accessibility. For example, if there is the “copy” feature on multiple places in the software, it should look the same, work the same and give the same system feedback for the user. I encountered the issue lately, and I failed to copy-paste something because I didn’t understand immediately what the available buttons were doing. It can disrupt the user flow and make performing tasks annoying for users. Guidelines could help in getting the concepts intuitive, right at the beginning, without being a UX expert – which can help users be less confused or frustrated.

If you could redesign or improve any part of iDempiere’s UI/UX, what would it be and why?

Ideally, I would do research and based on the gathered info, I could understand what are the areas that could provide the highest value. Based on my experiences until now, I would focus exploring the usability of the menu in navbar, opening of panes (left and right pane) – that is something users struggle to do intuitively, making the toolbar more intuitive, showing the user the record’s related entities (eg. sales order and invoice) without starting processes or without the user having to use search, form accessibility, user preferences. Without communicating that “hey, this is how you can perform this task” users don’t understand. But these are just some ideas, so they should be evaluated by gathering insights from the users.

In your view, what’s the most important principle for improving the user experience of complex systems like iDempiere?

Having common guidelines for components that are used over and over again. Modals, messages, settings, copying flows could follow the same logic, and it wouldn’t happen that something works in an unexpected way. Some things are logical to each of us, but without common guidelines, inconsistencies or not standard behaviour the software can cause never-ending frustration. This could manifest in a design guidelines documentation (where members could contribute, but a subject specialist – in this case, designer – would have to “approve”) along with a design system file which serves as a single source of truth for component visuals and behaviour (in Figma).

What tools, workflows, or design practices do you rely on the most?

Usually there is no time for complex research in a small team, but at least from bench-marking (gathering info about current solutions on the market) we can identify common patterns of user interfaces, user flows and decide based on the insights that we identified. Without assumption and jumping into implementation, we confirm our ideas are valid. We use Figjam for that.

How does it feel to be named Hero of the Month?

I am happy that I could spark some thoughts and hope that some of my input can improve the areas that were not getting enough focus.

What message would you like to share with the iDempiere community—any advice, encouragement, or ideas for collaboration?

Keep things moving, involve subject specialists on top of strong tech expertise. I think the goal is to focus on building a community that continues to attract and engage the right people (more and more of them) working on the right problems, building the right solutions. A community’s strength is in using the time and skills towards common goals. Keeping the focus, uniting behind a shared solution will benefit everyone.
I would also say there are some great opportunities to attract new members by working on the brand image, and how iDempiere shows up on software comparison websites – so people actually know about it and want to explore it more. Also, having resources – in form of comprehensive, up-to-date documentation for developers and implementors. Using strategies that align with the global aspect of the project and current market expectations could improve the perception and engage people. When iDempiere is presented in a way that matches what people expect from modern open-source projects, it helps them see it’s real value and supports all the great development work that’s happening.