[Sigia-l] Usability Horror Stories

[Todd R.Warfel]

Well, we had a case with a particular media asset management product, 
Artesia Teams, with one of my clients. Essentially, the client wound up 
investing $1.25M and 12 months of development time into trying to 
integrate the product with their existing workflow. It ended up being a 
complete and utter failure and the client, a non-profit, ended up 
having to absorb it as a burn cost. OUCH!

The failure came from a combination functionality that didn't map to 
existing workflow and behavior, and the failure of the vendor to make 
adjustments to their "custom" product for anything less than $10k for 
something as simple as adding a button, which my client would write the 
backend functionality to, promises from the vendor to my client that 
their product did "function x" out-of-the-box, when in fact it didn't, 
and a poor, unproductive interface/interaction design.

We ended up rolling a custom home grown solution in WebObjects in less 
than half the time originally invested in Artesia Teams for about 1/3 
the cost.

On Thursday, September 18, 2003, at 2:23 PM, Emily Leahy wrote:

> As
> part of this, he has asked us to find examples of
> "usability horror stories" where a product or site's
> lack of usability has cost a company on a
> near-catastrophic level.

Cheers!

Todd R. Warfel
User Experience Architect
Message First | making products easier to use
--------------------------------------
Contact Info
voice: 	(607) 339-9640
email: 	twarfel at messagefirst.com
web: 	www.messagefirst.com
aim:		twarfel at mac.com
--------------------------------------
In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In reality, they are not.