Comment by segmondy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by segmondy | Hacker News Reader

It's not. It's great. Most people forget that UX is like a language. You can't go about changing a language that people are accustomed to. It's a very expensive thing. Enterprise users pay a lot and are use to it. Changing the UX/UI means retraining tons of people, breaking integration that other businesses have built on their system. Most companies don't provide API, so businesses build on UI. What do you think happens when Amazon or Google or Facebook changes their UI? lots of businesses that screenscrape break. Now these customer are usually not paying, but imagine that they were paying. You now have a swarm of angry paying customers. I work in enterprise. There are lots of integration we have with other companies UI/UX. Over http, over terminal/mainframe. If anything changes, impact is millions. Of course to our shock and utter horror. NOT! Other businesses have built logic on our UI/UX. If we change some things, their integration breaks, hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of dollars at stake too. You see clunky, I see money, I see happy users, I see users familiar with the way it is and no retraining needed for 10,000 users.

I'm really inspired by a book that Geoffrey Moore wrote called "Dealing with Darwin". He talks about market cycles and the oscillation of complex & volume-based solutions. Enterprise software tends to line up as a complex solution. By Moore's definition, complex solutions often have to have deep integrations into large organizations such as legacy systems, 3rd party softwares, and can even contain consulting work to get the solution going. Because of how much work goes into integrating an enterprise solution into an organization, I feel it must be really difficult to invest any time into creating a good UX because of the complexity of the customer needs. I think UX becomes a low priority for these solutions. I read some of the comments here & I completely agree, they probably don't test their own product either. As the industry learns what's important and what's not, the market cycle start producing a volume-based solution, similar products are introduced that are much simpler and inherently tend to have a good UX. It's an interesting topic and I think lots of entrepreneurs can actually take advantage of this natural cycle. I think segmondy is presenting a first person view of what happens in complex solutions & I bet "I see users familiar with the way it is" is spot on.

Doesn't explain why the UX is bad. There are great user experiences from 40+ years ago that hold up.

Additions are added without breaking previous UX even when a better flow is possible. Imagine you have F and it's natural to go from E->F but it's also very nice to go from A->E->F, well if you already built a path from A->B->C->D->E, with Enterprise, they will have A->B->C-D->E->F, where modern consumer software will just change it from A->E->F and maybe move B to the main menu.

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