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These kind of bad UX problem can be easier to rationalize once we understand the money flow. Would you stop using it because of such UX? Would your stopping cau

by a_c 4y ago

These kind of bad UX problem can be easier to rationalize once we understand the money flow. Would you stop using it because of such UX? Would your stopping cause the company to stop procuring SAP? Was the search the selling point in the first place when the sales representative pitch the software to finance department? Probably no, no and no. So are all other bad UXes. And we can probably wager that a better UX doesn't yield the developer a better pay cheque.

Mister_Snuggles 4y ago
The ironic thing is that if the user stops using this software the company benefits because they don't have to pay out the expense claim that the user didn't enter. This seems like a win for the company and the company would conclude that using SAP has reduced their expenses. The key thing about enterprise software is that it's never sold to end-users, it's sold to senior managers and executives. The contact that this group will have with the software is to approve transactions (e.g., Reqs, POs, Expense Claims, etc) and maybe view some reports. You can bet that these interactions are very streamlined.
alkonaut 4y ago
It also probably describes long lead times and lots of overhead (expensive deployments etc). I guess the question that is often missing when these systems are specified and bought is “if we find a trivial but annoying UX papercut issue in the software which is 5 minutes of actual development time, how quickly and how cheaply would we have that fixed once we report the issue?” Having systems people like is important. I think that often seems to get lost.
emodendroket 4y ago
I think you could also work from likely evolution of the system. Probably this was just a string and somebody at some point thought, hey, let's add suggestions and did the quickest way they could think of to do that without fundamentally reworking.
underwater 4y ago
The is the hallmark of bureaucracy. Seperate the functions, and then let each team externalise the costs without any checks and balances. Finance purchase Concur because it solves their problems and integrates with their existing tools. They don't care that people hate it, or that it wastes the company's resourcing when people are fighting a broken UI instead of doing their day job. Normally engineers are shielded from this pattern in their day jobs. But I have worked at companies that have gone the other direction. In one I met with a risk averse gatekeeping team and told them that for a newly acquired product we were not going to be able to meet the (arbitrary) SLO for the glut of tickets they assigned us, and asked for help. Their suggestion was to pull the app from market.

by a_c 4y ago

Mister_Snuggles 4y ago

The ironic thing is that if the user stops using this software the company benefits because they don't have to pay out the expense claim that the user didn't enter. This seems like a win for the company and the company would conclude that using SAP has reduced their expenses. The key thing about enterprise software is that it's never sold to end-users, it's sold to senior managers and executives. The contact that this group will have with the software is to approve transactions (e.g., Reqs, POs, Expense Claims, etc) and maybe view some reports. You can bet that these interactions are very streamlined.

alkonaut 4y ago

It also probably describes long lead times and lots of overhead (expensive deployments etc). I guess the question that is often missing when these systems are specified and bought is “if we find a trivial but annoying UX papercut issue in the software which is 5 minutes of actual development time, how quickly and how cheaply would we have that fixed once we report the issue?” Having systems people like is important. I think that often seems to get lost.

emodendroket 4y ago

I think you could also work from likely evolution of the system. Probably this was just a string and somebody at some point thought, hey, let's add suggestions and did the quickest way they could think of to do that without fundamentally reworking.

underwater 4y ago

The is the hallmark of bureaucracy. Seperate the functions, and then let each team externalise the costs without any checks and balances. Finance purchase Concur because it solves their problems and integrates with their existing tools. They don't care that people hate it, or that it wastes the company's resourcing when people are fighting a broken UI instead of doing their day job. Normally engineers are shielded from this pattern in their day jobs. But I have worked at companies that have gone the other direction. In one I met with a risk averse gatekeeping team and told them that for a newly acquired product we were not going to be able to meet the (arbitrary) SLO for the glut of tickets they assigned us, and asked for help. Their suggestion was to pull the app from market.