[Sigia-l] Forcing practice

[Laura S. Quinn]

Todd says:  "...Either way, you increase support and training costs and have
an unproductive, undesirable
product.  So, tell me, how is that good business sense?"

I have to jump in here to defend Peter and the real world.  Certainly, I
imagine that you, and he, and most of us, are pained by the idea of creating
work-around solutions rather than fix the underlying problem.  But in the
real world, there are other considerations beyond user experience, and we
don't have any idea what they are in this case.  Let's say it would cost a
million dollars to fix the user experience.  The solution serves 10 users.
We've decided that instead of spending a million dollars, we're going to
build a new system, but that will take eight months.  In the meantime, we
need some sort of stop-gap to prevent bad data.  I don't have any idea if
that's the situation that Peter's in, but I'd say those sound like pretty
good business reasons to consider the things that he's considering.

Taking a hard line towards user experience - saying that there is never any
situation in which we should agree to anything less than an optimal user
experience - only defeats our own goals.  It's clearly nonsense from a
business perspective - there are budget and technical infeasibilities,
political realities - and it makes us look like zealots rather than people
with a valid business purpose.

Laura