4 ms·

I really hope you weren't a product manager at Intuit. >Second, the fact that Quickbooks is so awkward and inconsistent to use isn't a UI problem, it's a featu

by Dwolb 9y ago

I really hope you weren't a product manager at Intuit. >Second, the fact that Quickbooks is so awkward and inconsistent to use isn't a UI problem, it's a feature. This is an important lesson in designing software that people use for their jobs. When you make elegant, intuitive software that almost anyone can use in short order, it stops being an impressive item to put on a resume. And it stops being a barrier to entry for competing professionals. A good professional product does not have "awkward or inconsistent" UI. It has consistent, useful UI that can expand as user's sophistication grows. i.e. it has a learning curve The curve for learning an "awkard and inconsistent" UI you highlighted is useless and a detriment to SMB's everywhere. A proper SMB accounting approach would to have standard patterns for doing simple accounting with the ability to grow and extend as sophistication of your org grows.

curun1r 9y ago
I was a dev manager for a team that was working on a Quickbooks-adjacent product. I had a lot of meetings with core Quickbooks teams and met many of their PMs. They are, for the most part, really good at their jobs. Your comment comes off as incredibly naive. It's the same naivete that I had before seeing the internal perspective and it's what my comment was addressing. There are psychological phenomena in play that make an existing, market dominant piece of software more successful and harder to displace when it's objectively harder to use when that software forms the basis for someone's job. And it's important to realize this because this is counterintuitive to what those of us that create software for a living have been taught. We're taught to think like you. We're taught to make software that delights our users and is as easy as possible to use. But understanding a specific set of circumstances when that approach is destined to fail can be important.
- Dwolb 9y ago
  >There are psychological phenomena in play that make an existing, market dominant piece of software more successful and harder to displace when it's objectively harder to use when that software forms the basis for someone's job. For the record and from the GP's context, I'm going to assume by 'harder' you mean 'difficult to use UI'. I'd assert 'difficult to use UI' is the incorrect type of 'hardness' or 'difficulty' that should be present in an enterprise piece of software. Mainly because fighting a UI is non-value add to the goal of the user. The user's goal, in this case is to manage their books. Because of this tension of QB _purposefully_ being at odds with the user goal, I'd expect start-ups and new software products to gobble up QB market share over time. If this is the case, all QB can do is make it more difficult for current users to switch off them (.QBW file extension?) as their market share slowly dwindles and their channel sellers slowly disappear. Good 'difficulty' should come from the learning curve it takes to master (i.e. accurately, quickly, and reliably) the task at hand. FWIW I'd expect purposefully building difficult-to-use products has many negative externalities for the company culture and this would be a big red flag for any future Intuiters.
  - curun1r 9y ago
    You're still not getting it. A Bookkeeper's goal isn't to keep the books. That's their product, but they have their own small business that has more fundamental goals. Accounting software that's easy to use makes it easier to keep the books, but it runs counter to that more fundamental goal of running a successful small business. You're right that there are negative externalities. Small business accounting costs more than it needs to and, by extension, small businesses need to charge customers a bit more. But the people deciding which accounting software to use are the ones benefiting from that negative externality, not the ones paying for it. And as a software vendor, you always target decision makers over users or you go out of business.
    - davemel37 9y ago
      I don't think anyone is misunderstanding your point, I just think its ridiculously backwards. It's the equivalent of the government breaking roads so they can create jobs fixing those roads. If software can simplify bookkeeping and make the profession obsolete, and you deliberately make your software in a way that keeps that inefficiency at play...you guys are gonna wake up one day and realize you spent all your time serving the bloated middleware instead of the true end user, and your market will evaporate before you know what happened.... We get that from a short term perspective, it may make sense to keep it too complicated for the end users, but efficient markets will prevail short of forced intervention. If that is how Intuit thinks, I cannot wait for the day when they get displaced.
      - curun1r 9y ago
        Yes, it's ridiculously backwards. But it's reality. Intuit, at various times, has tried to make the kinds of changes you guys are suggesting. And every time they've run smack into reality and had to backpedal. Reality is like that...you can try to deny, and fail, or accept it and adjust your thinking. It isn't a how Intuit thinks issue, it's the way their customers think after decades of getting comfortable using Intuit software. Another example...Intuit has wanted to transition customers away from the desktop version of Quickbooks for many years now. If you think Quickbooks online has it's learning curve, just spend some time using the desktop product. It's a maze that takes years to learn to navigate and many of the "features" are horribly buggy from years of neglect. But pry it from their cold, dead hands Intuit cannot, so you can still buy new versions of Quickbooks Desktop. That's why what you guys are saying is so ridiculous. You're denying a reality in a field you're not familiar with. You're saying something should be different because it's inefficient or other industries work differently. But you haven't done the user research. You don't have decades of experience dealing with the people who actually spend money on the software. You're in no position to critique the way that Intuit thinks.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
odyssey7 9y ago
I agree with this. Good software updates that I've resisted in the past have often surprised me at how much I prefer them once I acclimate to them. The alternate line of thinking, that nothing big about the UI or system can ever change unless a customer specifically asks for it, seems to conveniently pop up in teams with enormous technical debt that make big changes unthinkable for managers. I'm guessing this is the case for QuickBooks - given the years they've spent supporting an inconsistent system, apparently with a goal of preventing it from becoming consistent, while also inserting customer-requested features. I have a hunch that if you're afraid of inconveniencing customers by making the software better, then the real problem is that you're afraid users won't stick around, and it's because you think that you haven't taken good enough care of them to weather the bump of re-acclimation. Compare the unchanging-system strategy to Snapchat's. Snapchat regularly improves their software (and users complain about it until they re-acclimate), because they are confident that users will stick around through updates; this confidence comes from the fact that they know they do a good job serving their users. So, my hunch is that when this unchanging-system strategy emerges, it's likely because you've already spent a long time disappointing users and eroding customer confidence.

by Dwolb 9y ago

curun1r 9y ago

I was a dev manager for a team that was working on a Quickbooks-adjacent product. I had a lot of meetings with core Quickbooks teams and met many of their PMs. They are, for the most part, really good at their jobs. Your comment comes off as incredibly naive. It's the same naivete that I had before seeing the internal perspective and it's what my comment was addressing. There are psychological phenomena in play that make an existing, market dominant piece of software more successful and harder to displace when it's objectively harder to use when that software forms the basis for someone's job. And it's important to realize this because this is counterintuitive to what those of us that create software for a living have been taught. We're taught to think like you. We're taught to make software that delights our users and is as easy as possible to use. But understanding a specific set of circumstances when that approach is destined to fail can be important.

Dwolb 9y ago
>There are psychological phenomena in play that make an existing, market dominant piece of software more successful and harder to displace when it's objectively harder to use when that software forms the basis for someone's job. For the record and from the GP's context, I'm going to assume by 'harder' you mean 'difficult to use UI'. I'd assert 'difficult to use UI' is the incorrect type of 'hardness' or 'difficulty' that should be present in an enterprise piece of software. Mainly because fighting a UI is non-value add to the goal of the user. The user's goal, in this case is to manage their books. Because of this tension of QB _purposefully_ being at odds with the user goal, I'd expect start-ups and new software products to gobble up QB market share over time. If this is the case, all QB can do is make it more difficult for current users to switch off them (.QBW file extension?) as their market share slowly dwindles and their channel sellers slowly disappear. Good 'difficulty' should come from the learning curve it takes to master (i.e. accurately, quickly, and reliably) the task at hand. FWIW I'd expect purposefully building difficult-to-use products has many negative externalities for the company culture and this would be a big red flag for any future Intuiters.
- curun1r 9y ago
  You're still not getting it. A Bookkeeper's goal isn't to keep the books. That's their product, but they have their own small business that has more fundamental goals. Accounting software that's easy to use makes it easier to keep the books, but it runs counter to that more fundamental goal of running a successful small business. You're right that there are negative externalities. Small business accounting costs more than it needs to and, by extension, small businesses need to charge customers a bit more. But the people deciding which accounting software to use are the ones benefiting from that negative externality, not the ones paying for it. And as a software vendor, you always target decision makers over users or you go out of business.
  - davemel37 9y ago
    I don't think anyone is misunderstanding your point, I just think its ridiculously backwards. It's the equivalent of the government breaking roads so they can create jobs fixing those roads. If software can simplify bookkeeping and make the profession obsolete, and you deliberately make your software in a way that keeps that inefficiency at play...you guys are gonna wake up one day and realize you spent all your time serving the bloated middleware instead of the true end user, and your market will evaporate before you know what happened.... We get that from a short term perspective, it may make sense to keep it too complicated for the end users, but efficient markets will prevail short of forced intervention. If that is how Intuit thinks, I cannot wait for the day when they get displaced.
    - curun1r 9y ago
      Yes, it's ridiculously backwards. But it's reality. Intuit, at various times, has tried to make the kinds of changes you guys are suggesting. And every time they've run smack into reality and had to backpedal. Reality is like that...you can try to deny, and fail, or accept it and adjust your thinking. It isn't a how Intuit thinks issue, it's the way their customers think after decades of getting comfortable using Intuit software. Another example...Intuit has wanted to transition customers away from the desktop version of Quickbooks for many years now. If you think Quickbooks online has it's learning curve, just spend some time using the desktop product. It's a maze that takes years to learn to navigate and many of the "features" are horribly buggy from years of neglect. But pry it from their cold, dead hands Intuit cannot, so you can still buy new versions of Quickbooks Desktop. That's why what you guys are saying is so ridiculous. You're denying a reality in a field you're not familiar with. You're saying something should be different because it's inefficient or other industries work differently. But you haven't done the user research. You don't have decades of experience dealing with the people who actually spend money on the software. You're in no position to critique the way that Intuit thinks.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

odyssey7 9y ago

I agree with this. Good software updates that I've resisted in the past have often surprised me at how much I prefer them once I acclimate to them. The alternate line of thinking, that nothing big about the UI or system can ever change unless a customer specifically asks for it, seems to conveniently pop up in teams with enormous technical debt that make big changes unthinkable for managers. I'm guessing this is the case for QuickBooks - given the years they've spent supporting an inconsistent system, apparently with a goal of preventing it from becoming consistent, while also inserting customer-requested features. I have a hunch that if you're afraid of inconveniencing customers by making the software better, then the real problem is that you're afraid users won't stick around, and it's because you think that you haven't taken good enough care of them to weather the bump of re-acclimation. Compare the unchanging-system strategy to Snapchat's. Snapchat regularly improves their software (and users complain about it until they re-acclimate), because they are confident that users will stick around through updates; this confidence comes from the fact that they know they do a good job serving their users. So, my hunch is that when this unchanging-system strategy emerges, it's likely because you've already spent a long time disappointing users and eroding customer confidence.