[Sigia-l] Business and decision drivers - was: IA and semiotics - and standards?

[Listera]

gunnar:

> Keeping an old - perhaps not so perfect interface - may be the right choice to
> make.

Ouch!

The annals of marketing is *also* full of success stories where the
innovator successfully challenged inertia, conventions, habits, etc. Staying
with computer examples: there was a time when anything with a GUI and a
mouse that wasn't DOS was laughed at as a toy. I haven't met too many people
who complain about the iPod UI, which when introduced was radically
different from all its predecessors. Same with the single-window UI paradigm
of iTunes in the digital-media app space. Etc.

It's a matter of payoff: if users believe the results of their investment in
learning the new UI will be significant, they will adopt.

Anecdote: A few years ago a very large corp paid me a huge sum to redesign
an enterprise app that would be used by a few thousand people when fully
deployed as version 1.0. For reasons too complicated to cite here, the 0.9
(beta) version was already released when I got there and that's what I
redesigned. The 0.9 version was demonstrably awful and was being used/tested
by less than 100 users who complained in various degrees. A small group of
unbelievably conservative but obviously powerful managers stopped the
release of the redesigned version altogether by claiming that the very small
number of (essentially) beta testers would be "inconvenienced." Apparently,
thousands of others wouldn't matter, for years to come.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba