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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

The root cause is that enterprise software is not sold to the people that use it.

As for salesforce.com you should see how much worse the things it replaced were.

I would also frame it in terms of usability rather than beauty. As a programmer one of my pet peeves is issue tracking systems that force you to fill out 25 irrelevant fields and wait 40 seconds several times to create a ticket. Not to mind that when you say you spent 4 hours on a ticket you might find that 4 hours got added to the estimate one time and the estimate got zeroed another time. A tell is that during standups the PM is moving post its around because it is too slow to use electronic tools.

In an environment like that what should take 30 seconds takes more like 5 minutes.

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Yes the article seems to be based on screenshots which are deemed to be too 'busy' or have too many gradients, rather than on actual usability.

The article is about taste, not usability. It is intentional. It is possible that usable solution still ugly. But in ideal world we should have both.

I'm not sure if that's possible. The screenshot in the article shows a lot of screens with a lot of information and a lot of possible actions to take. For software that I need to use to interact with large amount of complex data, I do not want options to be hidden behind 4/5 clicks.

When I was a part of a team that did enterprise-ish management software, one of the complaints of our initial design is that it's too simple and it takes too long to perform actions (>1 clicks from the main UI), and actually making it far more complex (users had to learn where the buttons are).

Also, "Taste" is pretty subjective. Personally, I find software that's easy to use to be of good taste. A high learning curve (lots of options) is not necessarily bad as long as I can be efficient when I'm familiar with the software (think: Vim vs Google Maps)

It may be possible but it is also difficult and adds one more constraint.

There certainly are cases where usability falls by the wayside for looks, and plenty of cases where the people involved are oblivious to everything and are just trying to get something based on mainframe or first wave client-server technology to be accessible by the web.

The learning curve issue is a real one and it has a few dimensions. One is the case of an app you use every day where click minimization is the number one thing. The other is the app that you use only occasionally and the user's long term memory is the bottleneck. One trouble is that even the app you use every day probably has some corner that you go into every six months, so even that kind of app has learning curve issues that don't go away.

In serious software for serious work there is a simple way to cut down the learning curve - training sessions. Instead of dumbing down the UI and slowing everyone down, you can just take new employees to a few hours long session where they get familiarized with the parts of the tool they need for the job.

Apologies in advance for my lack in eloquence, this is off the cuff...

I have been thinking this is true of the information services organizations being organized as ITaaS. There is only one help desk and this leads to IT behaving as a monopoly. As a monopoly there are few incentives to perform better. In order to preserve the organizations value, layers of bureaucracy are added to measure the performance of the organization. These grow organically but manifest themselves as status reports and status meetings. Small committees make broad mandates which operation-wise are questionable. Looking at the CRM this creates chains of approval for resolving tickets, forms with 25 fields which contain hundreds of selectable values.

The perverse design of enterprise CRM I feel is greatly a product of the monopolistic/bureaucratic behavior in a large organization.

>The root cause is that enterprise software is not sold to the people that use it.

That is changing I think. Quite many companies to pilot projects and compare several vendors in parallel to make a final selection. I agree that is not a majority though.

Anyway, people who buys software should take aesthetic into consideration.

P.S. I am the author of the article

Exactly. The feedback loop doesn't drive more usable, tasteful software. Enterprise software is a top down model. There is no competition inside the corporate firewall for any given solution so it's a monopoly and, like most monopolies, they don't enjoy continuous innovation and higher quality.

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