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It's strange how pervasive poor UI/UX (and poor software in general) is in enterprise software. I have never seen an ERP that looks and feels good to use (thou

It's strange how pervasive poor UI/UX (and poor software in general) is in enterprise software. I have never seen an ERP that looks and feels good to use (though I am sure some exist; I suspect Odoo falls in this category, but only because it's open source), they all just kind of exist as a means to an end, despite most ERPs being at least 50% of the chrome tabs an office worker keeps open all day. I wonder if this phenomenon serves as evidence that many decision makers don't really care about their workers and only seek to check boxes. Even marketing around most ERPs is designed this way: bulleted list of boxes checked off with almost zero real product previews

blantonl 2y ago
decision makers don't really care about their workers and only seek to check boxes Decision makers are simply a cog in the sales and marketing machine. 92.4517% of enterprise software decisions are driven by the relationship between the machine and decision maker without any regard to features, functionality, or fit.
- Volundr 2y ago
  I can't tell you how true this is. The first company I worked for merged with another org, and one of their muckity mucks was given the Director of Innovation position or something equally vague, whilst I was in charge of everything IT. It was absolutely shocking to me how much stuff he did was just bring in consultants he had a past relationship with who would promptly sell him some piece of overpriced enterprise software and charge us huge sums of money to integrate. Didn't matter if there was already a system in the org doing that, didn't matter how our evaluation went, didn't matter if it failed load testing, shove it in. And somehow after every project he was involved with failed, he just kept failing upwards.
allan_s 2y ago
It's about probabilities and risks shifting. My understanding after selling software to enterprise is that 1. they are risk averse, they prefer a solution that will improve by 0.1% the [whatever metrics they care about] with 0% chance of failure than one with over 9000% improvement and a 1% chance of failure. 2. To be sure of 1) they want a) a track record of success (the famous, "what are your other enterprise client") b) they have a loooong selling process where you will need to talk to their security team, their legal team, their change management team etc. 3. They have complex rules inherited from dozen of years of internal politics, merge and acquisition, half-done transition and they are not ready to change for you. (because the last time they did, it ended badly) 4. For the same reason they have a complex ecosystem of software that has not been made to intercommunicate with others, so your software will need to do excel export, talk to SFTP, talk to SOAP services, talk to system in COBOL where you must be sre that the field X can not exceed 5 digits in decimal representation. 5. They want to be sure you will still be alive in 5 years This being said , it means the vital part to be a enterprise software company is 1. you need a team that knows how to navigate their process, and not only your sales teams, you need technical guys , product guys that knows how to talk to a security team, the enteprise IT team 2. you need a technical team that will not laugh or flee when you will tell them to create a SOAP connector 3. you need to have more than 2 years of runaway (otherwise you will not having finished half of the sales process ) 4. you need a final software that does what they pay you for (in case of a payroll software: one that is able to generate a correct payslip ) with 0 risk of risks for them (you can have bugs , if you have a good insurance :) ) these things exists independently of the UX for the final user. One can even say it makes it harder, because making things simple is harder for hard things, and sorry but if you tell me the project is going to be 2 month longer because we will tweak the UX with end users , in addition to all the meetings are done, I will remove this step. so it means you can't have an enterprise with good UX without the proverbial soap connector, but the opposite can exists, which means at the end pure math dictate that you will see a lot of enteprise software with poor UX.
- megadal 2y ago
  While those are some big hurdles, I still don't believe they should impede decent UX. After spending years tweaking poor UXes and months building good ones, I really think good UX starts with a strong foundation. If a stack starts out with integrity and grows to the appeal of enterprise clients, adding SOAP isn't suddenly going to transform it from a modern SPA to being a crappy session-state adled 2008 MVC experience. If anything, with a good REST API, you can probably generate SOAP bindings rather easily. Odoo is a great example of this. It supports enterprises globally yet the software is still rather robust by comparison to the market.
  - allan_s 2y ago
    I'm not saying it necessarily impedes, I'm saying that at least it's never positive, at most neutral. The fact you believe it should or not does not change the harsh reality. I'm saying that to sell to enteprise with a good UX you need to check a lot of checkboxes, and even if they are independent , the probability to have: * can sell to enterprise is less than * can sell to enterprise + have a good UX. because while you can sell to enterprise without a good UX (regardless of how much you and I feel bad about this), you can't sell to enteprise without being to navigate their processes, without being able to talk and please their compliance team, to reassure that no you will no go bankrupt in 1 year. And I'm saying that it's most likely to impede having a good UX because a company's resource is limited. To start with strong UX fundation means that you've decided either to recrute one less dev, and instead hire a UX designer, or you've recruited a developer with a good UX sense (and it does not cost less, most likely more, than a developer without a good UX sense). Same, when developing a new feature, taking the UX in account takes equally or more time/money than without. So at the end a lot of company selling to enterprise ends up with a product without a good UX. And indeed Odoo is a good example that it's not impossible, which I'm not saying, just less probable.
the_snooze 2y ago
From this thread: >The point is, some products are sold directly to the end user, and are forced to prioritize usability. Other products are sold to an intermediary whose concerns are typically different from the user's needs. Such products don't HAVE to end up as unusable garbage, but usually do. https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776 https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776 It's a classic principal-agent problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
Anecdote: I held out for years with QuickBooks Desktop waiting for something like Odoo. My cofounder was the one who found it, and virtually our entire business runs on top of Odoo now that they’ve made their pricing sane. It’s an absolute pleasure to use, especially if you like keyboard shortcuts. And it’s fast on even a modest server as long as your database isn’t gasping for resources. Beautifully and simply designed from a UX/UI perspective, IMHO. Especially compared to the monstrosities that most other ERP vendors are putting out. Looking at you, Oracle.

blantonl 2y ago

decision makers don't really care about their workers and only seek to check boxes Decision makers are simply a cog in the sales and marketing machine. 92.4517% of enterprise software decisions are driven by the relationship between the machine and decision maker without any regard to features, functionality, or fit.

Volundr 2y ago
I can't tell you how true this is. The first company I worked for merged with another org, and one of their muckity mucks was given the Director of Innovation position or something equally vague, whilst I was in charge of everything IT. It was absolutely shocking to me how much stuff he did was just bring in consultants he had a past relationship with who would promptly sell him some piece of overpriced enterprise software and charge us huge sums of money to integrate. Didn't matter if there was already a system in the org doing that, didn't matter how our evaluation went, didn't matter if it failed load testing, shove it in. And somehow after every project he was involved with failed, he just kept failing upwards.

allan_s 2y ago

It's about probabilities and risks shifting. My understanding after selling software to enterprise is that 1. they are risk averse, they prefer a solution that will improve by 0.1% the [whatever metrics they care about] with 0% chance of failure than one with over 9000% improvement and a 1% chance of failure. 2. To be sure of 1) they want a) a track record of success (the famous, "what are your other enterprise client") b) they have a loooong selling process where you will need to talk to their security team, their legal team, their change management team etc. 3. They have complex rules inherited from dozen of years of internal politics, merge and acquisition, half-done transition and they are not ready to change for you. (because the last time they did, it ended badly) 4. For the same reason they have a complex ecosystem of software that has not been made to intercommunicate with others, so your software will need to do excel export, talk to SFTP, talk to SOAP services, talk to system in COBOL where you must be sre that the field X can not exceed 5 digits in decimal representation. 5. They want to be sure you will still be alive in 5 years This being said , it means the vital part to be a enterprise software company is 1. you need a team that knows how to navigate their process, and not only your sales teams, you need technical guys , product guys that knows how to talk to a security team, the enteprise IT team 2. you need a technical team that will not laugh or flee when you will tell them to create a SOAP connector 3. you need to have more than 2 years of runaway (otherwise you will not having finished half of the sales process ) 4. you need a final software that does what they pay you for (in case of a payroll software: one that is able to generate a correct payslip ) with 0 risk of risks for them (you can have bugs , if you have a good insurance :) ) these things exists independently of the UX for the final user. One can even say it makes it harder, because making things simple is harder for hard things, and sorry but if you tell me the project is going to be 2 month longer because we will tweak the UX with end users , in addition to all the meetings are done, I will remove this step. so it means you can't have an enterprise with good UX without the proverbial soap connector, but the opposite can exists, which means at the end pure math dictate that you will see a lot of enteprise software with poor UX.

megadal 2y ago
While those are some big hurdles, I still don't believe they should impede decent UX. After spending years tweaking poor UXes and months building good ones, I really think good UX starts with a strong foundation. If a stack starts out with integrity and grows to the appeal of enterprise clients, adding SOAP isn't suddenly going to transform it from a modern SPA to being a crappy session-state adled 2008 MVC experience. If anything, with a good REST API, you can probably generate SOAP bindings rather easily. Odoo is a great example of this. It supports enterprises globally yet the software is still rather robust by comparison to the market.
- allan_s 2y ago
  I'm not saying it necessarily impedes, I'm saying that at least it's never positive, at most neutral. The fact you believe it should or not does not change the harsh reality. I'm saying that to sell to enteprise with a good UX you need to check a lot of checkboxes, and even if they are independent , the probability to have: * can sell to enterprise is less than * can sell to enterprise + have a good UX. because while you can sell to enterprise without a good UX (regardless of how much you and I feel bad about this), you can't sell to enteprise without being to navigate their processes, without being able to talk and please their compliance team, to reassure that no you will no go bankrupt in 1 year. And I'm saying that it's most likely to impede having a good UX because a company's resource is limited. To start with strong UX fundation means that you've decided either to recrute one less dev, and instead hire a UX designer, or you've recruited a developer with a good UX sense (and it does not cost less, most likely more, than a developer without a good UX sense). Same, when developing a new feature, taking the UX in account takes equally or more time/money than without. So at the end a lot of company selling to enterprise ends up with a product without a good UX. And indeed Odoo is a good example that it's not impossible, which I'm not saying, just less probable.

the_snooze 2y ago

From this thread: >The point is, some products are sold directly to the end user, and are forced to prioritize usability. Other products are sold to an intermediary whose concerns are typically different from the user's needs. Such products don't HAVE to end up as unusable garbage, but usually do. https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776 https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776 It's a classic principal-agent problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

TheNewsIsHere 2y ago

Anecdote: I held out for years with QuickBooks Desktop waiting for something like Odoo. My cofounder was the one who found it, and virtually our entire business runs on top of Odoo now that they’ve made their pricing sane. It’s an absolute pleasure to use, especially if you like keyboard shortcuts. And it’s fast on even a modest server as long as your database isn’t gasping for resources. Beautifully and simply designed from a UX/UI perspective, IMHO. Especially compared to the monstrosities that most other ERP vendors are putting out. Looking at you, Oracle.