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Why Enterprise Software Sucks

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Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#411

Post by jeromebaek »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #381
ridaj wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except I can count on one hand the number of fortune 500 enterprises that moved to gsuite over o365. That's maybe another way of showing that UX is not the winning differentiator in enterprise that it is in consumer. > This reads like someone who lives in the valley and thinks the valley is in any way reflective of corporate America. I don't live in that valley, and I fully know that it doesn't reflect the rest of…

> That's maybe another way of showing that UX is not the winning differentiator in enterprise that it is in consumer. But it is. That and useful features. Both of which Office has, and GSuite has not. I don't remember the name of that "Word lite" program that was included with Windows for free around Vista/7, which could open less sophisticated .doc files and was a default binding for .rtf files. But compared to Micr…

i believe this was called WordPad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPad

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#412

Post by ben509 »

One thing I'm not following is a few remarks that they don't do usability testing because it is subjective and thus a lawsuit magnet.

We're talking about universities that, as part of their mission, have psychology departments run studies that must conform to ethical guidelines.

Couldn't they evaluate the usability of candidate products by coming up with a list of tasks that a small sample of students and professors must complete, and rate how difficult they are? Take the mean weighted by how critical the features are there's a reasonably objective usability score.

There's still a subjective element, but it can be mitigated by selecting participants at random and having them disclose any potential conflict of interest.

I realize this is no small undertaking, but it's part of their core operational model, so it doesn't seem unrealistic.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#413

Post by AmericanChopper »

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…

> But the average business does not really have such needs

Well the average business is by definition not an enterprise. Enterprises need things like a solid AD integration, self hosting, enough monitoring coverage to put things like DLP and anti virus controls in place (yeah I know anti virus sucks, but work in a company with 10,000+ people, and you’ll see it getting genuine hits every day).

The fact is a lot of the modern software with good UX that we all love doesn’t meet these basic requirements, or at least doesn’t meet them as well as the old enterprise stuff does.

Many “enterprises” are their own worst enemy in terms of UX, by simply not valuing it enough. But I’ve worked in some that have made incredibly well organized, well resourced, and well supported attempts to modernize their technology stacks, and the truth is that the best and most innovative software that’s produced today, often (and perhaps rightly) doesn’t have the basic needs of enterprise in mind. So even with the best intentions, you often end up stuck using apps with poor UX.

As a side note, you can do absolutely fantastic DevOps in enterprise these days (even if you’re on a VMware stack). But a lot of the user facing stuff still sucks. Especially IM, which is why I have little hope that the enterprise love of email will die anytime soon.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#414

Post by mcv »

This is very relevant to my current project. We're building a dashboard that's fed with very diverse data, could allow you navigate and examine that data in tons of different ways, and we could make it incredibly configurable.

But we're also aware that our users are not power users. It first needs to be understandable to use it. If we throw a ton of features at them, because they'll drown in them and then not use it. And the prospective users are the decision makers here: we're building this for upper management, and they have no idea that they should want this, so we have to make this attractive, easy and pleasant to use. When they see it, they have to want more, not be put off by incomprehensible complexity.

So we're holding back on features. I know a million features I could add to this, and I really want to, but every time the question becomes: how will they access this? How will they understand what this does? So we're careful in adding features, and put a lot of time into getting the interface right. It doesn't yet have all the features I want it to have, but hopefully all the features it has will be features they understand and want to use. And then we'll add more based on what they need, not on what we think we can offer, because that's going to be way too much.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#415

Post by danny_taco »

I'm the lead developer in an org where due to the nature of servicing multiple stakeholders that have a lot of say on what we build - we're building these these types of monstrosities where everything is configurable so it takes dozens of clicks to go anywhere and the end user is not a priority.

Yesterday I almost cried. I've started dusting off the old resume, catching up on my craft and I plan to go back as a senior software engineer in a consumer facing project at a remote first organization, wish me luck.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#416

Post by anderspitman »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #406
cnst wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, to be clear, this has nothing to do with "classroom". The problem is people design these things without any sort of actual testing in actual conditions where the software is supposed to be used. Displaying 5 results per page is a bug, not a feature. Having restrictions on filetypes is a bug, not a feature. The same could go on to the rest of their "features". (My biggest pet peeve is date formatting — just give…

> just give me ISO8601 dates, please; HackerNews, you, too! Strongly seconding. It's an annoying UX antipattern, especially as it loses precision over time ("28 minutes ago" is fine, but "yesterday" or "5 days ago" or - even worse - "2 years ago" is not; having the date specified to hours or minutes is actually useful, especially in context of a site with international audience). Doubly so on HN, which doesn't even b…

I'd prefer both.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#417

Post by gherkinnn »

beat wrote: post #391
Torwald wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UX isn’t valued Good UX drives costs down for training and draining of human capital. That should be the pitch. Next question, who in the fortune 100 should hear that pitch?

You're assuming that the cost of human capital actually matters in big corporations. As someone who has worked for several Fortune 100s and a couple of government agencies, I assure you, that is not the case. Employee time is treated as having no value, and things that damage the efficiency of employees are not relevant. I once saw a "cost saving" round prohibit our team's QA engineer from getting a new SoapUI licens…

It is absurdly easy to burn through thousands of dollars worth of employee time. Call something “review”, “emergency”, or simply discuss the colour of the bike shed. Everyone has an opinion on that.

Now invite all sorts of heads, leads, and other important people. Done.

I did consider setting up a mock meeting just to make that point. Let’s see.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#418

Post by teddyc »

I used to work in higher ed and dealt with the awful Blackboard system.

For reference as to how bad it was, different modules used different database vendors (MSSQL vs Oracle).

Also here's a comment I had left myself about how to work with dates in the Oracle db (aka the Blackboard Transaction System, aka BBTS):

  # BBTS doesn't use a date,datetime, or time column from its database.  

  # Instead, it uses a float that is the number of days since 12-30-1899.

  # The Ruby Time class is ideal for handling this, but the Ruby Time 

  # class doesn't work for dates before 01-01-1970.

  # The magic number is: TransactionSystem::MAGIC_DATE_NUMBER (25,569)

  # If BBTS is below that number, we must use the Date class.

  # If BBTS is above that number, we will subtract 25,569 from the BBTS 

  # and start counting from 01-01-1970 instead of 12-30-1899.

  # Dealing with dates before 1970 will take much longer to process.
It was quite a challenge to make use of it.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#419

Post by MarcScott »

shinjitsu wrote: post #396
cnst wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, to be clear, this has nothing to do with "classroom". The problem is people design these things without any sort of actual testing in actual conditions where the software is supposed to be used. Displaying 5 results per page is a bug, not a feature. Having restrictions on filetypes is a bug, not a feature. The same could go on to the rest of their "features". (My biggest pet peeve is date formatting — just give…

> Having restrictions on filetypes is a bug, not a feature. It should be - but for many school IT security types it really is a feature to limit file types

I fought this during my entire teaching career.

Blocking file types by extension is pointless. as you can just change the file type.

If you're worried about kids being able to run arbitrary python scripts on your network, then the security problem is not the kids, it's your shitty network.

People are given cash as bug bounties for finding security flaws in systems, but in schools they are punished!

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#420

Post by TeMPOraL »

jeromebaek wrote: post #411
TeMPOraL wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's maybe another way of showing that UX is not the winning differentiator in enterprise that it is in consumer. But it is. That and useful features. Both of which Office has, and GSuite has not. I don't remember the name of that "Word lite" program that was included with Windows for free around Vista/7, which could open less sophisticated .doc files and was a default binding for .rtf files. But compared to Micr…

i believe this was called WordPad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPad

Yes, that one, thanks!
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