Josh Evnin

All Employees Deserve GREAT Software

I’m not here to help build mediocre software. Quite the opposite, actually. No one should be subjected to sub-par tools, whether they’re using their software at home, school, work, or somewhere in-between.

One of my UCD-minded colleagues pointed out to me last week that often business users are considered a “special” set of users because they’re expected (nay, demanded) to use specific software to do their jobs. If the time & expenses tracking software isn’t usable, there isn’t much an individual employee can do about it. In contrast, home or non-business users have many options when it comes to their software. If a person decides Mapquest just isn’t good enough, the mapper can switch to Google Maps. If TaxCut sucks, TurboTax is just around the corner.

There is definitely something wrong with this picture. Giving home users options is a great thing, but why must enterprise users be subjected to second-rate tools, why not get high quality like https://truabilities.com? Just because someone joins an organization does not mean their work should be monopolized by crap tools, right?

So I ask, why shouldn’t all the User-Centered methods employed ubiquitously throughout the consumer market applied to business software as well?

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4 responses

  1. Corporate Culture Avatar
    Corporate Culture

    business competitor A doesn’t show his custom tailored business software to business competitor B. therefore, business competitor B has no frame of reference as to which consultancy he should choose to build her software, just the subjective reputation of the company, which is a pretty shitty tool (think about how many accenture customers there are).

    on the other hand, off the shelf software is widely used and more is known about products and features. for instance, a database developer can make a better informed decision on an rdbms. so, companies compete, and products get better.

    what do consultancies primarily compete on? price my friend. user-centered design, focus groups etc are not cheap, and would probably undermine your competitive advantage

  2. Apurva Avatar
    Apurva

    Must. Agree. I’ve. Been. Fighting. For. This. Too.

  3. Chris Johnston Avatar
    Chris Johnston

    I completely agree with you. I had a similar discussion during lunch on one of my ThoughtWorks interviews. I personally don’t see any reason why corporate software should suck.

    Yes, user testing can be expensive, but then so can using bad software. Business people are stuck in front of computer screens all day long and forced to use the software that we create for them. If that software is hard to use, hard to interpret or hard to learn, then those people loose productivity and the company looses money. Far more money then it would have costs to do some usability testing.

    Plus, I like Joel Spolsky’s guerrilla user testing technique: simply grab someone, anyone, in the hallway and have them spend a few minutes trying to do something with your software. You will very quickly find where the problems lie. You haven’t spent any money and you have given a business person a fun distraction from their work for a few minutes. How expensive is that?

    On the other hand, I think part of the problem lies with developers. As a rule of thumb, developers should never design user interfaces; designers should design user interfaces. To me, this seems obvious, but I have known far too many developers who think they have the ability to design an interface and what you get is unusable. We as developers need to recognize our own strengths and weaknesses and start adding some designers to the team.

    Bottom line, in my opinion, is that crappy software costs much, much more then great software. Written any other way is simply a myth.

  4. Notta Blog » Blog Archive » With a Good Pair

    […] Simply riffing with someone over why a particular UI element will or won’t work is amazingly interesting to me…who knows why. Either way, my point is that not only is Pairing all of the things I mentioned above, but with a good pair it makes work so much more interesting and enjoyable. And, as I’ve ranted about before, all workers should be able to enjoy the work they are doing. […]

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