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Why Enterprise Software Sucks

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Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#311

Post by teddyh »

mantoto wrote: post #141

Do you know the huge GitHub banner which gives you a link to there basic tutorial? I have seen too many people in it NOT clicking this huge waste of space away but instead always scrolling down before doing anything. User don't care that much apparently.

Users theoretically care, they just don’t see it; it’s called banner blindness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness

Also, “In fact, users don’t read anything.”:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#312

Post by opportune »

ineptech wrote: post #43
vfc1 wrote: post #9

Pretty true. For example, some of the worst applications I have ever used are by far timesheet applications. It's a product with a completely captive audience, that cannot go to the competition. If you don't fill your timesheet, you don't get paid its that simple. Typically these are either built-in house, or are an expensive third party product with terrible usability, bought by managers who might not even have to u…

Ditto with job applicant portals. They have a bunch of weird features for doing obscure HR stuff like internal approval chains, but terrible UX for the actual applicant. Would it be so hard to handle applicants whose resume is a url?

Yeah, I believe it is Taleo where you have to re-enter all the info from your resume multiple times as you go through a 6 step portal. I absolutely hate that interface although thankfully most places I want to work at now don’t use it anymore

I don’t know the name of it but I’ve seen a lot of places now with a single screen portal which I love, just enter your name, answer the self reporting crap, maybe select what position/location you’re interested in, drop your resume, and you’re done.

I have no idea why that wasn’t the flow from the beginning.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#313

Post by GordonS »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #20

I think this gets it wrong. The real reason enterprise software sucks is that enterprises have complex and unique workflows and would prefer to buy software that they can fit to their workflow rather than change the workflows of their profitable business with tens of thousands of staff who will need retraining. If you look at all of the most successful software of all time they are the complete antithesis of the Unix…

While I agree in general, I'm not sure SAP is the best example - in enterprise circles, SAP is famous for forcing you to change your workflows and processes to fit the SAP model.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#314

Post by dredmorbius »

maxerickson wrote: post #113
dredmorbius wrote: post #28

User-design indirection is a tremendous problem. It's a form of the principle-agent problem, or of what I've been noodling at under the general category of "manifestation", which is the idea that there are problems which are obvious and evident because they are manifest : immediately apparent, visible, obvious, observed, experienced, felt. And those which are not : nonapparent, invisible, non-obvious, unobserved, not…

Ironically, the tumbler is manifest and the design issues are vaguely not.

Sort of.

Though the tumbler was invisible, and hence, not perceptible. You could go through any number of cases of phenomena throughout history, such as the germ theory of disease, prions, electromagnetic force, subatomic particles, or mental health, all of which have, at least by current reckoning, some level of cause or mechanism, but which were seen as beyond description or explanation in the past.

The case especially of moving from some sort of divine or moral explanation, as has been the case for both infectious and (somewhat still the case) mental illness is a critical one. Similarly for natural phenomena (comets, asteroid impacts, earthquakes, volcanoes, cyclonic storms), often seen in the past as portents of the gods / a god, rather than events with specific causal mechanisms.

There are several Big Problems currently facing humanity which are straddling this manifest/not-manifest cusp, with media manipulation and global warming being two of the more prominent.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#315

Post by pgwhalen »

blantonl wrote: post #228
dmix wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d bet good money Watson got sold to a bunch of companies who wanted “AI” then they didn’t do anything useful with it. It was a smart play by IBM, the sales guys want to say AI and machine learning, so give them some generic crap which gets loosely integrated into parent projects and they can have a field day on the phone selling it. Watson would be a perfect study on modern big business software that these billion…

I'm almost certain that Watson was a series of Python and Prolog "scripts" that were packaged together with big black boxes, blue lights, tagged as AI, and run through the IBM sales and marketing machine. The result was huge margins for IBM and customers scratching their heads afterwards.

Watson isn’t software, it’s a brand.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#316

Post by moonbug »

ridaj wrote: post #152
freddie_mercury wrote: post #20

I think this gets it wrong. The real reason enterprise software sucks is that enterprises have complex and unique workflows and would prefer to buy software that they can fit to their workflow rather than change the workflows of their profitable business with tens of thousands of staff who will need retraining. If you look at all of the most successful software of all time they are the complete antithesis of the Unix…

No, this does completely get it right. Enterprises thought they needed all the control and security features of Blackberry until the iPhone came along and made the UX gap unsustainable. Enterprises thought they needed on-premise hosting of Exchange, Office and SharePoint instances under their control for email and productivity, until GSuite came up with a better, less configurable user experience based on consumer fe…

the prospect of running an enterprise on gsuite is..amusing.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#317

Post by beachy »

shadowgovt wrote: post #263
Macha wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The compelling feature of gsuite for my employer was apparently the ability to turn off IMAP etc and therefore rule out emails being kept locally/beyond the retention period for better access control/cheaper legal compliance, not anything UX related.

That's... Kind of hilarious. I'm assuming your employer has never heard of printers or copy-paste. ;)

You're thinking about this very much from a techy point of view.

We have a similar value prop with our platform (we store PII including actual identity documents).

It's not about making it impossible for users to download and store sensitive data. Everyone knows that that's impossible - yet somehow Snapchat and its disappearing messages is still a thing.

Instead, it is intended to be coupled with policies. As long as the company has a policy against downloading/storing confidential information, then the company is covered.

Then, when a case of e.g identity theft happens through a rogue employee, the company can demonstrate that it has taken all reasonable steps to avoid it.

That is a much better position than showing up in court and saying "yeah, we didn't try to prevent people from downloading PII, that's impossible anyway".

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#318

Post by ryanmcbride »

mjlee wrote: post #7

I'm not sure where this originates from, but the most succinct definition I've heard for "Enterprise Software" is that the person who pays for it isn't the person who uses it.

I agree, I had this discussion with a coworker the other day. So many tools are used because either an executive got marketed to effectively by the tool provider.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#319

Post by kragen »

investinme wrote: post #299
kragen wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way to use Photoshop without a mouse is to use a Wacom tablet. My Fitts parameter estimates for mouse interaction are terrible, but much better than any keystroke interface I've seen, much less command-line interfaces. You were attacking interactive image editing by typing strings of text: > in command line ImageMagick you say "x=100 y=200". This is not a trivial difference But I don't think anyone really th…

> I wonder if there's a way to describe and interactively refine descriptions of areas of interest in a symbolic way—as Lisp trees if not Unix strings—maybe using existing neural networks. Certainly a speculative idea, of course. I think the future is more like saying to the computer what you actually want. Like "delete the apple from the picture". Photoshop already has a primitive form of this particular action, cal…

In a sense these are different uses of a computer for graphics: one is a medium of human visual expression, which is Photoshop’s forte, while “delete the apple” is more like delegating a functional task to an independent contractor. I don't think one is likely to entirely replace the other, just as Photoshop hasn't replaced netpbm, photography hasn't replaced painting (even if we do more painting in PS than with paint nowadays), and the city bus hasn't replaced dancing or skateboarding, even though all of them are ways to move your body.

There are certainly some uses of PS that things like caption-to-image GANs will replace. Analogously, last night I spent quite a while with the expressive, high-bandwidth, direct-manipulation interface of a box cutter cutting cardboard, for something I'd much rather be doing with a laser cutter cutting shapes generated from a constrained-optimization algorithm. At least this time I managed to only cut the cardboard.

Texture synthesis is a really interesting tool for both purposes. There are a lot of amazing papers in recent SIGGRAPHs with new algorithms for this kind of thing.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#320

Post by taude »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #20

I think this gets it wrong. The real reason enterprise software sucks is that enterprises have complex and unique workflows and would prefer to buy software that they can fit to their workflow rather than change the workflows of their profitable business with tens of thousands of staff who will need retraining. If you look at all of the most successful software of all time they are the complete antithesis of the Unix…

Maybe the OP wanted to say the UX of enterprise software?
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