I read a great article a few weeks back about making business applications user-friendly. The basic idea is that most business applications are designed to serve the needs of the business and not the needs of the user. It’s a fantastic article and if you develop business applications, you should read it.
I completely agree with the premise: if we want business applications to be pleasant to use, we need to spend time on interaction design, learning from users, prototyping and iterating. In my experience, however, the “business” just doesn’t care about how user-friendly the software is. And unfortunately, they’re paying the bills.
There are downsides to this way of thinking. Applications that aren’t user-friendly bother people. They erode their happiness and make their work a chore. It slows them down, and that actually has a direct impact on the bottom line; it’s just difficult for managers to understand that.
As developers and designers, we can solve the problem. We’re perfectly capable of providing a piece of software that not only gets the job done, but does it quickly and in a way that users enjoy using. But doing that takes time, and at my current employer, the dictate is: “Just get something out there. We’ll make it nice later.” But I know as well as they do: later never comes. So we end up stuck with applications that are so unfriendly that even some of the developers hate using them.
I work for a company where research is a priority. We’re developing an application to replace their existing research application, which basically drives the entire research side of the business. We’re fixing data problems, improving the interface, and trying to make it more user friendly. But this time constraint means I can’t produce my best work. When I’m crunched for time, I can’t spend the time it takes to produce an application that works exactly how the user needs it to work. Instead, I have to cater exclusively to getting the job done. The business’ needs take priority over the user needs.
Until businesses realize their own employees’ needs are more important than just shoving a tool in their hands, this isn’t going to change. There’s little a developer or designer can do to change the mindset. All we can do is make small pushes in the right direction when opportunities arise.