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“Enterprise” software, as a rule, has horrible user interfaces. The people who buy this kind of stuff are three layers of management removed from the people wh
by sethg 16y ago
“Enterprise” software, as a rule, has horrible user interfaces. The people who buy this kind of stuff are three layers of management removed from the people who actually use it, the software is often customized, and quality of user experience is not a critical factor in the purchasing decision.
From the perspective of a non-geek who works in a medium-to-large company, bad “enterprise” software is just an irritation that goes with the job, like bad coffee. You may complain about it but you don’t seriously expect it to be fixed.
- dkarl 16y agoIf you pick up a book on best practices in development of enterprise software, it is basically a catalog of obviously beneficial things that people fantasize about in the pages of a book because they are never allowed to do them in real life. For instance, talking to prospective users. The importance of this has been stressed over and over again and is no longer disputed. In fact, when an in-house team started designing changes to an accounting app my friend had to use, there was an official user expert designated to work with the developers. The user "expert" was her manager, who had never used the application that was being changed, had never used a similar application, and had never even done a job similar to the one done by the users. What's more, she forbade the developers to speak to the users because she didn't want the development effort to affect their productivity. Oh, it did affect their productivity eventually, believe me it did. (It's an exaggeration to say it's uniformly terrible; I had a good experience with the one enterprise app I built, but it was for a network operations team, so they understood a lot about software and about the need to be generous with time and access.)