[Sigia-l] Forcing practice

[Todd R.Warfel]

On Oct 7, 2003, at 9:46 AM, <prai at prady.com> wrote:

> [...] it has to compliment agendas of "corporate Training", 
> "Consultancy",
> "Customer Support" as added cost to each sale.
>
> The motivation to follow User Centered approach in these industry 
> scares
> the hell out of Managers who drive the strategy to build such products.
> Whether you believe it or not, this is my experience that those 
> managers
> who are in-charge of building such enterprise applications are scared 
> that
> overtly simple product may take away the return business.

I've experienced this as well. Which is exactly why I raised the issue 
in the first place - we need to communicate to them that designing with 
the end-user in mind makes good business sense. The examples you cite 
above like Corporate Training are the very reason why they need to 
design with the end user in mind.

As an example, we recently got an inquiry from a large medical 
institution about an hour away. They had converted their original 
desktop application from Oracle into a Web based application using 
Oracle's conversion tools. The original application was bad enough. The 
"ported" application is no better from a heuristic perspective. They've 
found that their support and training costs are getting out of control, 
as users can't get the application the first time, or upon subsequent 
use. Oh, and the application is a corporate training application.

The strategy of "lets make our applications difficult to use so that 
they require training" is not a sustainable model. We're seeing clients 
left and right abandoning these types of applications in favor of ones 
that are just as, if not more, powerful and easier to use.

Cheers!

Todd R. Warfel
User Experience Architect
MessageFirst | making products easier to use
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email: 	twarfel at messagefirst.com
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In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In practice, they are not.