With the number of web and phone applications available today, most people experience a number of different user interfaces on a daily basis. Most consumer-focused interfaces are pretty nice, but a lot of enterprise or internal company interfaces are not.
In my years of working with many different companies, I’ve seen some crazy things for user interfaces. Sometimes I find myself asking if the developer was colorblind, and other times I’m simply baffled at the number of steps required to accomplish a single task in the system. If I weren’t walking through the system with someone who had been using it for years, I wouldn’t even know where to begin to find the necessary information.
Developing a user interface is about more than just how it looks. It’s also about information flow. Do the menus make sense to the user? Does information in the system flow in a logical way for that specific business? Can a single task be accomplished from a single menu, or does it require three different menu options to do one thing?
Yes, the design matters, too. Some developers don’t understand the importance of a clean interface. But that’s sometimes what you get when a “bits and bytes” developer creates something for an entire company to use. It makes sense to them as a developer, and they don’t realize that it’s difficult for a non-developer to use. But many enterprise user interfaces are used by hundreds of non-developers every day!
A lot of companies continue to foster terrible user interface design either because they simply don’t know it’s terrible or they’re unwilling to invest the time (or money) in something better. But there’s a cost to poor user interface design—both in terms of employee frustration and in actual time spent using the interface.
How much money do you lose when employees can’t figure out how to use your system? Or when they have to click through multiple different menus to pull one piece of information? It’s an intangible cost, but it’s there.
In recent years, I’ve seen an increased awareness of the importance of user interfaces, although it’s still going to be quite a while before every company has a quality user interface. But new developers are leading the charge because they’ve been exposed to so many consumer user interfaces. They realize that enterprise interfaces deserve the same level of quality and ease of use. And that’s a good thing!
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