Add a Comment Now - We Want to Hear From You
by Russell Wilson
A good user interface is one of the most important aspects of an enterprise product. While the underlying architecture is extremely important to deliver the functionality, to the end-user, the interface is the product. They don’t know, (and don’t care, usually,) of what goes on behind the scenes, other than that they expect things to work. Every way they interact with the product is through the interface.
Having a well-thought out interface can save time, save frustration, and create emotional links to the product and draw the user back to it. Especially with enterprise apps, where vendors are tasked with reducing costs calculated by employee time on-task, the more that you can shorten the time it takes employees to do certain tasks by making them more intuitive and more efficient, the more you can save organizations in their total cost of ownership. (TCO)
If a user becomes familiar with one product and they feel another product is very similar, there’s much shorter training time and it becomes much easier to deploy. A big piece of TCO is training time and the need for support – a useful, simple, unified user interface can reduce both.
So then, why do many enterprise programs have poor user interfaces?
Software development is a very young science. It hasn’t been around for a long time compared to, say, formal architecture. The way people in the IT industry typically build software, is that we basically go directly to the builder and say, “Hey, I want a house with four rooms and two bathrooms.” So the builder starts throwing up some beams. He’s good at his job, he knows how the wood behaves, how to fit it together, and how to build a foundation. You end up with a structure with no rhyme and reason to it, but it will have four rooms and two bathrooms. Then you decide: “That’s not really what I expected.” So you have him tear down one of the bathrooms and add another room. That’s kind of how a lot of software is developed today.
In architecture, you have an architect, an interior designer, and a lot of people who put a lot of thought up-front into the form and function of what they create, and you have builders who are specialized in actually implementing it. The architects usually can’t build, and the builders usually can’t design – separated areas of expertise.
There’s no product field other than the digital software field that is as loosely structured and pays as little attention to design as software. Airplane production, car production – you have designers feeding to implementers and engineers. I think software will get there, eventually – but because of the nature of software and the fact that anyone with a computer can potentially learn to write code is why software didn’t follow a more structured path. When you get to true enterprise apps that will survive the test of time and deliver real value, you really have to have a good process in place where you think about the product up-front, design the product, and apply best practices.
That’s where software development is going. There’s more demand for polished products – we’ve put up with a lot of issues with software and less-than-optimal interfaces, and we’re now seeing the need for it. So you’re going to see more of a division of expertise in those areas.
I think we're on the cusp of a wave that's beginning, but isn't quite there. Design is a hot topic, but you still have many organizations that don't really know how to get their hands around it, don't understand its true value, and may not even know that they need it. To implement successful design, organizations must determine: Where the design department fits in the organization? What authority does the design department have over development? How does design work with product management? Structuring these things correctly is a challenge but absolutely necessary for ultimate success.
Russell Wilson is Director of Product Design at NetQoS.
Technorati Tags: User Interface Programming Enterprise Apps UI Design Software
