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Comment by hanniabu | Hacker News Reader

SAP wouldn't be that disheartening to use if it weren't so damn slow and if UI/UX wasn't from the 90s.

In some of the repetitive data entry areas, like forms to enter purchase invoices, it used to have the most productive UI I have ever used. The cursor started in the right box, tabbed to the right places etc. I would swap that screen for my current modern one any day

This is the feedback I've got while working on a customisation project based on a different ERP (red one). Users actually expect your interface to behave in the exactly same way as their ERP does (TABs and keyboard shortcuts included).

> The cursor started in the right box, tabbed to the right places etc.

We must have not used the same SAP forms.

I don’t know if we are using the latest versions but the UI has many other sins, not the least having buttons in odd places (submit is often at the top), many many screens to get to a place, slow as you say.

I don’t care so much that the UI looks from the 90s. For an internal application, a battleship grey winform is perfectly fine, as long as the workflow is simple, fast and intuitive.

Do you work in a grey office with grey carpets and grey desks?

Aesthetics matter. Make software that is beautiful and a joy to use.

Honestly when I work, I focus on the content. Bloomberg Terminals command based UI is a designer’s nightmare, but you get anywhere you want to go in a few keystrokes, and as far as I can tell, most other users love it too.

Most existing and trained users love it.

I have heard same argument for command line interface in yester years, why switch to Graphical User Interface, when CLI is so much more faster and I love it (and so do my other friends around me).

Attrition (so new employees), interns, fresh campus hires, I guess does not happen in that universe.

No it's not that bad, it has auto-complete, it has search functionalities for both commands and data, and there has been a help button to chat with a bloomberg support person for as long as I have been in this industry.

The Bloomberg terminal does two things which make it much more approachable for beginners than you suggest. Don't know which function you need to do something? Type in what you want (and possibly hit HELP if it doesn't autocomplete for you) and you'll find it 9 times out of 10. The 1 time out of 10 that doesn't work, you start a chat with support and they'll point you in the right direction pretty well immediately.

The one slightly annoying thing is that for a lot of things there are at least 5 different ways to do the same thing/5 different screens with very similar functionality, and everyone seems to use a different one.

But it's also worth saying it's a tool specifically aimed at specialists - it's not going to hold back on giving you a huge number of options over which data you want and how you want it presented, and it's not going to warn you that some data might be incomplete or not the one 'everyone' uses.

Agree with all of this. But the color scheme, screens that distort when resized, US date formats shown to European users, text based graphics, textual commands, etc, would make more than one graphic designer physically sick.

> Aesthetics matter.

Everyone seems to think that, and then they produce software that looks beautiful and is horrible to use.

Gray buttons and scrollbars at least make it obvious which part of the UI you can click!

The book Peopleware had a section about this subject.

  In one study after another, workers failed
  to give much weight to decor in choosing,
  for instance, among variously colored panels
  and fixtures.

But then:

  If you ask specifically about noise, privacy
  and table and counter space, though,
  [...] matter a lot.

The whole thing about both office space and software is: design matters in the aspects where it gets work done. After that, nobody cares. Your working environment should help you, support you, and then get out of your way.

This corresponds with my personal experience: the win95-ish software design was my peak for daily productivity. Besides, you generally get a main window with grey widgets and colored icons at the sides, and a white working area full of colored items. So the end result isn`t all that boring.

https://books.google.be/books?id=TVQUAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA74&ots=O...

Beautiful visual design is not necessarily correlated with beautiful functional design (i.e. being a joy to use, or - as the parent post put it - simple, fast and intuitive). I think the latter is more important for a lot of software (especially software you use every day in your work) but often sacrificed for the former.

First, software should be efficient to use.

Too many designers, maybe a majority, make "beautiful" software that is a pain to use.

Are forms today better than they used to be? I don't think so. Most "web based" or "web inspired" apps today are slow, unintuitive, and have idiosyncratic behavior. How often have you had a form that didn't work right because some Javascript request failed and/or it decided your entry wasn't correct? How often did tabbing through fields actually work as you expected?

While your statement is technically correct, it leads to software that just isn't a joy to use. We get used to having bad usability, and we take for granted that forms just don't work 100% and so we take the safe route - for example writing long text in an editor and copy-and-pasting to be sure. Have you never done this?

Having beautiful interfaces is nice, but it should be an afterthought and not a priority. Because it is difficult to optimize everything at the same time, and beauty is lexicographically unimportant compared to efficiency.

I love the SAP UI - yea, its the 90's when UI was far superior than today's whitespace filled, shadow-less buttons, complete lack of skeumorphic elements, magenta gradients and huge typography - See Windows 95 UI: https://twitter.com/tuomassalo/status/978717292023500805

It is dense, extremely clear and consice. I agree with the slowness though.

I feel like there continues to be a huge disconnect between UI designers and their users.

I'm a power user so I am not the best person to ask for UX advice, but I talk to people all the time that just wish they still had the classic Windows 9x UI's and things more or less were "boring".

Reminds me a little bit of a statement about how Taxi drivers can tell you what works architecturally better than an actual architect when it comes to ground floor interaction.

That's because contemporary designers are obsessed with trends, frameworks and aesthetics. When Dieter Rams designed Braun products, he didn't have a UI framework. He deeply thought about interaction and feedback to the user.

Contemporary UI trends bother me except one: websites like drewdevault.com and text.npr.com are refreshing.

That’s the problem with software. There are two categories of software: software that their developers use themselves, and software made for other people. Visual Studio is the prime example of a software made by people who use it, it continuously improves (minus a few hiccups), it is made for the most used functionalities to be at your fingertips, it doesn’t hide stuff in layers of submenus, etc. The list is long of software made for others, and the general rule is “fuck it, good enough”.

This is also why I believe the Windows 8/10 developers must be working on macs.

I agree with your comment except Visual Studio part. Everytime I use Visual Studio it feels like I'm using a big pile of hacks of varying age.

What language do you write in using Visual Studio?

I use it with C++ and C# and I can't say stress enough how amazing it is to use with C++, compared to the teeth-pulling experience of using xcode for the same tasks (some of which are impossible in xcode, edit-and-continue for example, set next statement).

It might be just me, I use Visual Studio to write C# (not my "first" language) plugins for an older (non C# core) tool. Sometimes I also use Visual Studio to manage SSIS ETL packages, but I need an older VS version because they are not always backwards compatible - this leaves me with three versions installed on my computer - 2015,2017 and 2019 - each for something else.

To be honest what I don't like is the neverending march of tiled frames for everything - the whole program is one frame, then i have one frame for the code, one frame for the solution explorer, two more frames for error list and output, another one for properties and so on. A lot of screen space is taken by just blank spaces or dividers.

Another thing that I didn't like was that the 'Comment selection' option is hidden in Edit -> Advanced -> Comment selection. You also have to use two keyboard shortcuts in succession to comment something (Ctrl+K, Ctrl+C) and the uncomment shortcut is different (Ctrl+K, Ctrl+U). All this while Ctrl + / does nothing and could do both at the same time.

I often need the whole VS solution and not just the code when I need to copy paste the project to a different folder or a different machine.

Have you tried moving the frames around a bit? I normally dump all the frames down the bottom particularly for debugging.

The double-keystroke thing is a bit odd yes, and the menu is hidden a bit far away for ease of navigation. Still, it could be worse - it could be a RIBBON!

From my own experience interacting with Microsoft developers, there are more using Macs (with Boot Camp dual boots) then you might expect.

But it's hardly a majority (or even that many at all). If you're developing primarily on the CLR or for one the the many Microsoft sub platforms, the first-party tooling is actually quite good. It's only when you need to do both, or stray from one a bit too much, that things become arduous.

Generally however, the Mac users are almost always essentially Microsoft developers who have to target both Windows and Linux and don't want to deal with managing/maintaining a Linux daily driver. MacOS is "close enough". It's pretty representative of the non-Microsoft developers in similar situations.

And no: the Linux Subsystem isn't enough for them either.

SAP suffers from the same issue as all other universally-malleable systems: at best, they're only as good as the designer allows them to be.

However, just because it resembles 90's UI (which I'm a massive fan of) doesn't mean it follows it philosophically. It regularly breaks its own rules and is deliberately designed to be obscure as possible.

> “just because it resembles 90’s UI?”

I wasn’t talking about mere resemblance. I’m talking about functionality, density of information, layout, hierarchy of importance exemplified by various aspects of the UI, clarity and intent, feedback and signaling, on and on. The whole thing. The only thing that bothered me about SAP was how clunky it felt, simply because it was slow.

I’ll quote myself: “It is dense, extremely clear and consice.”, yep it’s great to use. I also love JMP statistical software UI and Cinema4D UI. They’re a pleasure to use.

The UI /elements/ of the 90s were fine. That doesn't mean that anyone will necessarily build a good UI using them.

SAP and software designed to offer high levels of customization in general leave the task of building a complete UI to middle managers familiar with business processes. They do not generally have any understanding of UI design and are quite happy to add a 50x50px, non-resizable text box for content that will often span multiple paragraphs.

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