Is good corporate software design too much to ask?

January 25, 2006, 1:45 pm

Someone left a copy of Computing on the train this morning. Thumbing through it there was an interesting comment around how “users” are becoming more demanding in their expectations.

Why should you be able to go home and see your 13 year old son playing with a Sony PSP, with awesome graphics, great design and compelling experience, but when you get to work the brand new Enterprise Application looks like it was designed by amateurs, is difficult to use and is yet another cumbersome product that IT have rolled out with apparently little input from the people who are actually going to use it (“No-one asked my opinion…”.)

Why should you be able to have a google mail account with more than 2 gigabytes of storage space and a whopping 10 meg filesize you can send or recieve. Yet in your corporate mail box everytime you try to send an important and timely mail you get a warning message preventing you from sending it until you free up some space. (And what happens to your level of productivity when that happens? ) And the creative agency who want to send you the new creative treatments can’t email them to you because they are too big. What do you look like?

Users are beginning to expect more. Giving them functionality is no longer enough, you have to ensure the application is engaging and compelling. (Why? Because happy users start to like IT, and a loved IT function will have less difficulty securing budget for the really sexy projects that everyone wants to do).

Leave a Reply