Obviously this is a rhetorical question because the world runs on Enterprise software, right? But when was the last time someone raved to you about how great their new financial or operational system is?
If you want to unleash a diatribe of loathing, just ask a doctor about their Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system. Or a Procurement specialist about their new SAP Contract Management application. Or a CFO with a recently implemented ERP system, whose staff is abandoning ship.
The fact is that much of the world’s “Enterprise” software is moderately to severely lacking in usability. The only software out there that seems to generate any real excitement these days is the latest mobile app or game.
My theory on the mediocre User Experience (UX) of many Enterprise applications is that most, if not all of them, were rushed to market. Somebody had a grand “Unicorn” idea, talked a VC or three into giving them $15-20M to make it happen, and commenced a mad rush to release enough of it to compete in the large-business RFP (Request for Proposal) wars, where the core of the evaluation process is a massive feature checklist. (Dave Duffield of Peoplesoft/Workday – I’m looking at you here).
The Peoplesoft-Workday progression is actually a pretty common recipe for Enterprise software. Because of the rapid turnover of technology platforms for applications, software is constantly being re-written. In my own career, I’ve seen the Enterprise software locus move from mainframes to minicomputers to PCs to client-server to Web 1.0 and now Web 2.0, each requiring an almost total re-write. That’s a new generation every 8-9 years, which is generally how long it takes for most Enterprise software to finally mature into a broad, deep and stable offering.
So a fair bit of the “new” cloud ERP, CRM, HR, Procurement, Business Intelligence, Project Management software today is just a re-creation of existing on-premise applications. In my own experience, I’ve seen Salesforce arise from Siebel CRM, Cognos Powerplay reincarnated as Qlik, and Onestream emerge as a next-generation Oracle HFM. It’s like a Mickey Rooney movie from the 1930s where someone says “Hey, let’s get the old gang together for another romp.” (Whoa, that last one dates me a bit, doesn’t it?)
Back to today, a proper, efficient transition to the cloud involves a complete re-write of the code for a multi-tenant architecture, that makes scores – or thousands – of individual copies of the software manageable en masse, one for each Enterprise customer. But in the rush to market, user experience is often a secondary consideration to viable features and functions. So end-users suffer from software that just does not seem to be designed for them.
In the personal productivity space, fundamental features such as creating a new task were created as a 3- or 4-step process, with multiple transitions between the mouse and keyboard, each involving a 3-4 second response-time cycle. Who would use a system where capturing the data – often for the benefit of management, vs. the user – was so unwieldy and time-consuming? Instead, users relied on off-line mechanisms like pen and paper, spreadsheets, outliners, organizers, etc. Yes, sixty years into the Computer Revolution, a lot of paper is still being wasted.
Worse, the advent of the internet as the standard for User Interface innovation has driven software design towards an open, sparse User Interface (UI), designed to encourage scrolling and multiple clicks. This format is the just the opposite of a more dense, detailed, and efficient UI that would minimize scrolling and clicks to quickly perform frequently-used enterprise tasks.
And none of the software is quite the same. Don’t even get me started on the random, seemingly spiteful UI differentiations that Google has inflicted on its productivity applications. After the Mac and Windows, Google’s Apps/G Suite/Workspace kludge barely amounts to the third-best personal productivity UI on the market. It’s reminiscent of the old DOS days, when UI differentiation was all the rage and the average user could only manage to learn two or three apps before their head exploded.
Accordingly, Enterprise Software is ripe for innovations in User Interface that reduce the number of clicks and keystrokes to perform common transactions. In revamping these applications, the key focus should be on the small percentage of tasks that users perform most of the time – a classic Pareto 80/20 approach – to make them more compact and efficient to perform.
Salesforce.com is a “Classic” example of this UI phenomena, and affords a great opportunity for unique innovation. Its 7-yr old “Lightning” UX was designed to require no coding, with components that could only be configured and arranged on the user’s screen by administrators. But any configuration-based system has limits in functionality, as well as performance.
Both of these issues were addressed in 2019 by the release of Lightning Web Components (LWC), a flexible, Web 2.0 API to the mammoth Salesforce.com platform. New LWC apps are just beginning to hit the market. So take a look at the Express Console for a streamlined, enhanced Salesforce UI.