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I've had similar experience working on a B2B product that we sell to financial institutions. As the end users got a taste for our UX, they began to threaten re

I've had similar experience working on a B2B product that we sell to financial institutions. As the end users got a taste for our UX, they began to threaten resignation if they had to go back to the old system. Word of mouth and human competition are a hell of a thing. Once a branch manager sees how efficiently someone across the street is running their business (which is effectively identical due to mountainous regulations), they will start doing our marketing for us. I feel like tuning software for the human factor is something that almost every MBA still misses to this day. Making "this software feels good to use" an explicit objective is clearly impossible. You have to want the experience to be good at a fundamental level. Its an ambient part of every item that merges. You have to care about the product and customer very deeply to achieve this.

b112 4y ago
You have to care about the product and customer very deeply to achieve this. So many miss this, and the big boys don't only miss the forest for the trees, they can't see the leaves either. Total, narrow, limited scope. Then big boys win by Hulk Smash. Startups win by leaves and forest.
- agentultra 4y ago
  I think this is ultimately what won over our users and why they championed our product so hard. A manager at a factory would use their budget to buy our software off their approved vendors list, get it going in a couple of weeks, and within months they were among the top performing factories. As word spread and other sites adopted our product the same trend happened. And we cared deeply about the end users. One of the best things I did was get our development teams on-site with users. We had lunch with them, saw how they used our software, and took back tons of ideas for improvements and features that we released frequently and often. I got to know a number of our users on a first name basis and would use some of them to try out new features before we released them to the rest of our customers. It was awesome. SAP is still the 800lb gorilla and probably always will be. It was neat to work in an environment where we cared this deeply about our users that they fought to be able to use our software.
rendaw 4y ago
Software developers miss it too. Most libraries are pushed for how efficient they are, how few allocations they have, which algorithms they use, etc. regardless of in what circumstances they're being used, and easy to use libraries are assumed to be making a significant tradeoff. Ease of use isn't something that can be measured though, and most people don't have the framework for arguing UX decisions so debates come down to "well I think this is easier to use than that". Maybe not SAP, but no matter how terrible a system is there's someone who's used to it and will argue that it's easier to use than the alternative, and that proponents of the alternative just need to get used to it. I kind of feel like this is something a leader with a feel for it needs to dictate. Torvalds made a similar comment about good sense with Julian Hamano, which I don't feel effectively supports this, but I do agree with at some level.

b112 4y ago

You have to care about the product and customer very deeply to achieve this. So many miss this, and the big boys don't only miss the forest for the trees, they can't see the leaves either. Total, narrow, limited scope. Then big boys win by Hulk Smash. Startups win by leaves and forest.

agentultra 4y ago
I think this is ultimately what won over our users and why they championed our product so hard. A manager at a factory would use their budget to buy our software off their approved vendors list, get it going in a couple of weeks, and within months they were among the top performing factories. As word spread and other sites adopted our product the same trend happened. And we cared deeply about the end users. One of the best things I did was get our development teams on-site with users. We had lunch with them, saw how they used our software, and took back tons of ideas for improvements and features that we released frequently and often. I got to know a number of our users on a first name basis and would use some of them to try out new features before we released them to the rest of our customers. It was awesome. SAP is still the 800lb gorilla and probably always will be. It was neat to work in an environment where we cared this deeply about our users that they fought to be able to use our software.

rendaw 4y ago

Software developers miss it too. Most libraries are pushed for how efficient they are, how few allocations they have, which algorithms they use, etc. regardless of in what circumstances they're being used, and easy to use libraries are assumed to be making a significant tradeoff. Ease of use isn't something that can be measured though, and most people don't have the framework for arguing UX decisions so debates come down to "well I think this is easier to use than that". Maybe not SAP, but no matter how terrible a system is there's someone who's used to it and will argue that it's easier to use than the alternative, and that proponents of the alternative just need to get used to it. I kind of feel like this is something a leader with a feel for it needs to dictate. Torvalds made a similar comment about good sense with Julian Hamano, which I don't feel effectively supports this, but I do agree with at some level.