Citibank just got a $500M lesson in the importance of UI design

arstechnica.com

11 points·nailer··6 comments

> The actual work of entering this transaction into Flexcube fell to a subcontractor in India named Arokia Raj. He was presented with a Flexcube screen that looked like this: [...]

Penny wise and pound foolish. Invest in employees and training.

There are 256 possible combinations (8 checkboxes), and the screenshot doesn't show a feedback region. Therefore, there's no UI design there, that's just a query browser. I mean, it seems to be autogenerated.

Anyone selling enterprise applications has better UI ever helped get you a deal. All fortune 50 companies I have worked for had horrible ui/ux. At one of them they didn't even bother with GUI.

The lesson is useless and Citibank will not treat this screwup as a lesson. UI is still very much unimportant to those in charge of buying this kind of software. In a way, they also seek for user hostility, as the fluency in an obscure software’s inner workings is internal political leverage.

> [...] an obscure software’s inner workings is internal political leverage.

What do you mean by this? Do you mean ensuring job security, i.e. if only a few people know how to use this piece of software they are less likely to be made redundant?

Surely this half a billion kind of mistake will mean someone will most likely be made redundant. I think Citi execs will want to make sure this mistake doesn't happen again and improve this process and the usability of the UI.

Someone will get fired because of a blunder. All the others would just say "oh, but this would have never happened to me".

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