2008-10-20
The Ear-hair of Usability
Ned Richards just posted a link to an article on the armpit of usability. It suggests that there’s a correlation between a decrease in usability and the level of speciality of an application:
I don’t really disagree with this, but it did remind me of something else I noticed at my old job, when they changed from an in-house timesheet system to Maconomy (horrifying slogan: “People made profitable”). The former was a bit idiosyncractic, but it did a nice job of tying in to the (also homebrewed) ticketing system.
Maconomy, on the other hand, turned out to be a usability nightmare. Even logging in was a trial: for some reason it treated minor sub-versions of Firefox as incompatible (“you’re using 2.0.0.9? I’m not sure that’s ok, go back to 2.0.0.8!”) while ignoring the multiple patchlevel sins hidden behind IE’s user-visible “6” and “7” labels. Then there was the tendency not to let you log in if you had the slightest trouble with your password, the way it forgot your projects from week to week, and so on.
Eventually I came up with a theory to explain why the user experience was so horrific, and it was simply this: that Maconomy had spent all their time optimising the UI for the 5% of the company that saw as administrators. I have no idea if this is true, as I never was one; it’s quite possibly their interface was terrible as well. However, it seemed to be a reasonable hypothesis: companies will optimise for the people who most directly pay them, not their end users. No wonder so much “enterprise” software is awful.
