on life, business, technology & all that

Usability and user centered design for long has been ragarded as a second priority by software companies and consumer product companies. In the recent times the focus has started to shift to better the existing models.

Steve Krug’s book “Don’t make me think” probably was the first one that started a new phase in usability design and usability as a discipline started to emerge.

The idea is simple. A user should not have to read a 100 page manual and take a training course to get started using a product, but take a look around and you find all the enterprise softwares take weeks and months of training just to get the users comfortable with the idea of using a SAP or an Oracle.

Companies spend millions of dollars in licensing enterprise software and then some more on training their employees to sue this software, most times all the features and so called flexibility that these enterprisey softwares provide is never used by these companies, but they do make the software difficult to use.

Learning stress is something that every organization needs to evaluate when buying a enterprise software. If a lean software would make it easier for their employees to get their job done than that should be prefered over a “infinite feature enterprise” software that scares the hell out of your employees.

Enterprise software will never take a enterprise anywhere if the employees are never going to use it, and user adoption for many enterprise software projects end up beiing low enough to not justify the huge investments.

Software shouldn’t be another full time job your employees need to do, they don’t need to learn, read, operate, make mistake, upgrade, learn again, ask, ask some more, ask “whos the right guy to ask this?”, ask “how do i”, ask “where is the IT guy?” or say “this software sucks”.

Stay lean, stay agile, get the work done. Simple is beautiful.