What ails enterprise application software

Posted by: Amburkar Sankar Rao on: December 5, 2009

• In: Design | Enterprise Software | Usability
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Enterprise application software is one of the heavily invested technologies and it largely drives investment in other technology areas within an enterprise. Billions of peoples around the world with varied responsibilities use enterprise software on a daily basis to perform their day-to-day tasks.  They use enterprise application software to complete from an ordinary task such as applying for a leave, creating an expense to most complex task such scheduling work assignments, allocating bonus etc.,. Though these applications are most widely used, the user experience of these applications forthe end user is far from encouraging and leaves much to be desired. There is general and accepted tendency among enterprise application users that they need to go through a huge change management exercise within their organization and develop expertise in just using these applications to perform ordinary tasks.

In my view, what ails enterprise software applications is that it was never originally designed for easy use of its customers. If you dig little deep in the strategies employed by most enterprise application software vendor, you would see that user experience design would not be a major milestone within their development processes. Most vendors do not know who their end customers are and why and for what purpose are they using this product? The application software vendor performs truly a great technical design such as identifying and prioritizing the features, data model design, technical design. The human aspect of it is often overlooked and UI design and development is the least preferred activities of developers. Nothing explains the plight of UI design more than the cartoon strip given below.

Lets look at some specific items that makes the vendor to overlook the user experience design.

1. Race to develop compelling feature: First and foremost is the race the vendors are in to introduce new applications and features before their competitors launch. Since there is huge gap between the time the software is bought and it’s implanted and used, the vendors naturally skip or shorten the human factor design step from the product development cycle. The tendency is that if there are any problems with the software, it will report and can be fixed. End of the day customer bought the software because it supports the features and not because of its ease of use. As long as the features and there is a way to use that however painful it’s the end user’s to use, vendors are find with that.
2. Match competitor’s functionality: The marketing team in any product development company wants to ensure product they sell should support all features that the competitors offer. This way they do not allow competitor to differentiate their offering in the market and adding more features in to their product, they can differentiate and overtake the competitor. To meet marketing requirements, the development will force introduce the feature even if the feature cannot be supported given the technology design.
3. Buyer is different from users: The buyer of the software is mostly C-level executives or the VPs with in any organization. The CEOs and CIOs look at the vendor brand name, market leadership and number of features supported by the product and not necessarily its ease of use since most of them don’t use this product. The purchase is generally made at the corporate level and the application will be installed around all their departments.
4. Product Development Methodology: The traditional product development methods followed in non-software industry always includes a step for industrial design that looks at the aesthetics and usability of the product developed.
5. Design Decision: The key decisions around which product and features to be supported are either made by the CEOs or Product levels VPs within any vendor company. To include a feature in the release the product managers start designing to the product that will satisfy the decision makers. The decision makers hardly use these products and more often or not they don’t understand the end users. The design that impressed almost and always never met the user’s expectation.
6. Misunderstood design: Most product development team view software design is all about creating jazzy looking icons, stylishly designed button and using all the color supported by the latest display screens. Though these can be used to improve the design and look and feel, design goes much beyond just how things are displayed on the screen. The design should allow the end user complete their responsibilities with ease
7. Technology limitations: The technology used to render the UI elements will have its own limitations. The developer understands these limitations and often the design suggested by the designer either cannot be implemented or to implement such as feature would require major redevelopment effort. In such cases the product development team either comes out with a decision that is technically feasible but compromises user experience or lets the developer come out with a design that can be implemented.
8. Information Overload: Enterprise application software is sophisticated and they support a wide variety of business process. Unaware about the customer usage, the product development ensures that that business process are supported from an single page and display data pertaining these business process within single. The end user gets lost in information overload and  is stranded in the information jungle now knowing how to complete a simple task.