My latest column at UXmatters was just posted. It’s part 2 of my December article “The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters.” Again, my main points are:
Organizations making enterprise-level technology selections often do an incomplete job of assessing the real-world effects of the new applications they impose on their staffs’ workflows and processes.
and:
The technology selection process typically neglects methods of evaluating the goodness of fit between the enterprise users’ processes, workflow, and needs, and the vendors’ solutions. Organizations could avoid many a rollout disaster simply by testing the usability of vendors’ solutions with employees during a trial phase.
In this part 2, I pick up where part 1′s “j’accuse” leaves off, and actually provide a framework for enterprise user experience practitioners to employ when trying to get involved in the assessment of enterprise software under consideration by their organization. Rather than recap it all here, I’ll just point you to the article.
The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters ::? Paul Sherman
I feel like Steve Martin in “The Jerk“, when he gets his first royalty check. (Only mine is really more like 250, not 250K…) I just received the first royalty payment on Usability Success Stories, the book I put out in early 2007. Total: $437 USD.
I’m actually not disappointed. Quite frankly I’m surprised the book earns anything. Hey, it’s the first one. And if it did suddenly start selling like hotcakes (do those actually sell well?), I’d want some formal mechanism to share with the chapter contributors, as it was an edited volume (with three of the chapters by me).
So I’m pleasantly surprised to learn that my latest column in Uxmatters is getting good notices.
The title is “Why Enterprise Software Usability Matters” and in it I talk about why enterprise application usability lags behind consumer software and web site usability.
To summarize and quote myself:
Over the past twenty years, the field of user experience has been fortunate. Software and hardware product organizations increasingly have adopted user-centered design methods such as contextual user research, usability testing, and iterative interaction design. In large part, this has occurred because the market has demanded it. More than ever, good interaction design and high usability are part of the price of entry to markets.
However, there’s one area that I believe has lagged behind: the enterprise software space. I can’t tell you how many frustratingly unusable enterprise Web applications I’ve encountered during my 12 plus years in corporate America. As important as the user experience of enterprise software is to a business’s success, why isn’t its assessment usually a factor in technology selection?
Nice to learn that something I have to say resonates. After my last UXmatters article was met with the sound of chirping crickets, I was starting to worry…and I thought people would really groove to the idea that you can evaluate and measure the risk that your product will be perceived as malware by the market.
Just goes to show, you never can tell which one of your album tracks will be the hit single.
The Usability of Enterprise Software Matters :: Paul Sherman
