4 ms·

The Bloomberg Terminal is a great example. There is nothing intuitive about is at all and using the mouse with it is quite painful. (Here's what a news screen

by cmadan 13y ago

The Bloomberg Terminal is a great example. There is nothing intuitive about is at all and using the mouse with it is quite painful. (Here's what a news screen in the terminal looks like http://www.businessinsider.com/type-this-command-into-your-bloomberg-terminal-and-youll-basically-get-theflyonthewallcom-2010-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/type-this-command-into-your-b...) However, every new feature we had to release needed to have every action accessible using the keyboard. There were best practices for using certain keys with certain actions (so that they were consistent across the features) and this was one of the most important things of an UI review. I ended up using the keyboard always whenever interacting with the terminal. The Chief UI guy at Bloomberg was ex-Wall Street and told us that when he started working on his first job on Wall Street, someone came up to his PC and disconnected his mouse so that he would learn how to use the Terminal properly and efficiently.

xorgar831 13y ago
Intuitiveness aside, the other major issue with enterprise software is the efficiency of use, and how out of touch it is with the task at hand. They slow you down considerably IMO. e.g. having to tell the app things it could just figure out, sloppy focus that requires you to fuss with the UI, having to input a lot of text in small text box that won't resize or spell check it, having to manually click a button to auto-complete, modal dialog boxes that block you from reading important info in another pane, uselessly vague or incorrect error messages for easily correctable problems cause you to waste hours guessing what the real problem is, returns no error message at all, oh you're using the wrong browser, oh to attach a file in your enterprise webmail you need to install Sliverlight, oh the web based wiki plugin for your enterprise document system only works on Windows with IE, oh mobile browsers are not supported, let me slowly redraw the screen a few more times due to some .Net + Areo legacy issue and hang your window manager, supports Kerberos SSO but requires to you enter a password, doesn't let you enter a username or password since it uses Kerberos SSO... etc.

by cmadan 13y ago

xorgar831 13y ago

Intuitiveness aside, the other major issue with enterprise software is the efficiency of use, and how out of touch it is with the task at hand. They slow you down considerably IMO. e.g. having to tell the app things it could just figure out, sloppy focus that requires you to fuss with the UI, having to input a lot of text in small text box that won't resize or spell check it, having to manually click a button to auto-complete, modal dialog boxes that block you from reading important info in another pane, uselessly vague or incorrect error messages for easily correctable problems cause you to waste hours guessing what the real problem is, returns no error message at all, oh you're using the wrong browser, oh to attach a file in your enterprise webmail you need to install Sliverlight, oh the web based wiki plugin for your enterprise document system only works on Windows with IE, oh mobile browsers are not supported, let me slowly redraw the screen a few more times due to some .Net + Areo legacy issue and hang your window manager, supports Kerberos SSO but requires to you enter a password, doesn't let you enter a username or password since it uses Kerberos SSO... etc.