
Enterprise software vendors have no taste - lelf
https://medium.com/michael-dubakov-selection/enterprise-software-vendors-have-no-taste-add7e78b7f69
======
pinaceae
The design challenge behind a modern enterprise app is also way steeper than
on any consumer app.

Enterprise apps like CRM, ERP, HR, etc. need to cover a myriad of use cases
and local/regional/global intricacies. They achieve this through configuration
and even customization options. Nobody, ever, uses enterprise apps out of the
box.

So your iPad app now needs to readjust and reconfigure itself based on
customer defined data models, page layouts, workflows, triggers. And by
customer I mean some yokel at Accenture/CapGemini/etc who is at least three
layers removed from the person who wrote the requirements, plus never had any
real training on how to configure the app.

And as they can change even stuff like field labels, your beautiful and simple
UI now needs to handle huge strings in random places, etc.

Source: Running a team that builds a very successful enterprise app in a
specific vertical. And we're spending a huge amount of time on protecting the
end users from all the tasteless forces between us and them.

Props to the Salesforce UX team, who are fighting the same fight. Go look at
the Salesforce Wave analytics app - truly wonderful UI. Their way of drilling
into a donut graph is simply awesome.

~~~
dpweb
It's not about making it "look good". Completely subjective. The app needs the
capbility to switch out the CSS. For instance, we resell/implement a popular
cloud app - just our company - we do dozens of large implementations.

Out of box, this app has a super modern look! It is not the SAP etc.. of days
gone by. Even with this, some love it, some hate it. Waste of time trying to
guess what people think looks good.

Put their logo on, probably 8 out of 10 ask for this. No brainer.

Need custom CSS, 1 out of 20 ask for this. App should be able to.

If they want to get crazy, the capability for complete custom pages. Maybe 1
out of 50 customers ask for this and after you quote them the price they'll
not want it.

------
herge
Enterprise software is often picked by committee, who will find it easier (at
the same price point) to go for the product with more features rather than the
product with a better design.

Hence, most of the negative feedback enterprise software vendors receive from
the sales process is usually "We went with competitor X because they could do
more for us.", which pushes the vendor to add more features at the expense of
taste.

~~~
acveilleux
I work in enterprise software as well and unless the UX/features of an app is
critical, you are spot on.

On the product I work on, one of the major GUI client is heavily used by power
users with direct decision factor on the deals. It gets a lot of effort and
polish and IxD folks go to client sites and maintain a feedback loop.

Other parts of the app are meant to be used by, well, "lesser" users (from a
sales PoV) and get less IxD time/effort. It's all very rational.

------
devonkim
The article author seems to have had very little experience actually in the
positions that he criticizes. The truth is that actually good people in those
positions are working very hard and that they have basically no resources
available nor dedicated to "make it look good." The number of cycles that
consumer-oriented start-ups put towards design is roughly similar to what
enterprises would spend on compliance and security. Both sides are motivated
by completely different business drivers - start-ups and consumer companies
need design to drive customer acquisition, and enterprises tend to require
sales teams to be able to engage their enterprise customers. This dramatically
changes the output obviously.

Only the top-performing enterprise vendors that have been able to get the
funding necessary to meet compliance issues AND design have a remote chance of
doing decent UI.

Also, another factor to consider is that most enterprise software these days
by the typical vendors are acquisitions, so that software has already been
around for roughly... 5 years or so. After they're rebranded, it's been
another 2 years and the original engineers and designers have left after
displeasure with their new masters. And most of these new companies have very
little interest in rocking the boat and just want to keep squeezing the
existing customers for whatever and will take years and years to introduce the
acquired software to their other accounts. So, by then you'll have really,
really old software that you just bought.

~~~
tablet
>The article author seems to have had very little experience actually in the
positions that he criticizes

The article author runs a company for 10 years that creates a single product
for B2B market.

------
ocdtrekkie
They may not look pretty, but they work a lot better than the over-designed
crud with pretty UIs. As a SysAdmin, I hope none of these enterprise vendors
ever hires a single designer.

~~~
lultimouomo
I laughed when I read the complaint about the "embarrassing lack of spaces"...
Add the generous amount of space any fancy _à la page_ UI needs and try to
keep the all the functionality these apps have, you'll need way more than a 4k
screen for it to fit the screen.

No, less is not always better.

~~~
tablet
So you think this is OK?
[http://cl.ly/image/0a0r1P1m0b2U](http://cl.ly/image/0a0r1P1m0b2U)

~~~
smcl
I don't think that is quite what the parent was referring to. I think it was
more "space" as in "have a clean simple uncluttered UI with ample padding
around the edges" (see point 3 here:
[https://medium.com/@erikdkennedy/7-rules-for-creating-
gorgeo...](https://medium.com/@erikdkennedy/7-rules-for-creating-gorgeous-ui-
part-1-559d4e805cda?hn=1)) not _literally_ a lack of &nbsp; spaces between
elements.

~~~
tablet
I mean exactly that in the article. Spaces between forms and labels.

~~~
smcl
Ah sorry, I take that back then

------
PaulHoule
The root cause is that enterprise software is not sold to the people that use
it.

As for salesforce.com you should see how much worse the things it replaced
were.

I would also frame it in terms of usability rather than beauty. As a
programmer one of my pet peeves is issue tracking systems that force you to
fill out 25 irrelevant fields and wait 40 seconds several times to create a
ticket. Not to mind that when you say you spent 4 hours on a ticket you might
find that 4 hours got added to the estimate one time and the estimate got
zeroed another time. A tell is that during standups the PM is moving post its
around because it is too slow to use electronic tools.

In an environment like that what should take 30 seconds takes more like 5
minutes.

~~~
rikkus
Yes the article seems to be based on screenshots which are deemed to be too
'busy' or have too many gradients, rather than on actual usability.

~~~
tablet
The article is about taste, not usability. It is intentional. It is possible
that usable solution still ugly. But in ideal world we should have both.

~~~
pwnna
I'm not sure if that's possible. The screenshot in the article shows a lot of
screens with a lot of information and a lot of possible actions to take. For
software that I need to use to interact with large amount of complex data, I
do not want options to be hidden behind 4/5 clicks.

When I was a part of a team that did enterprise-ish management software, one
of the complaints of our initial design is that it's too simple and it takes
too long to perform actions (>1 clicks from the main UI), and actually making
it far more complex (users had to learn where the buttons are).

Also, "Taste" is pretty subjective. Personally, I find software that's easy to
use to be of good taste. A high learning curve (lots of options) is not
necessarily bad as long as I can be efficient when I'm familiar with the
software (think: Vim vs Google Maps)

~~~
PaulHoule
It may be possible but it is also difficult and adds one more constraint.

There certainly are cases where usability falls by the wayside for looks, and
plenty of cases where the people involved are oblivious to everything and are
just trying to get something based on mainframe or first wave client-server
technology to be accessible by the web.

The learning curve issue is a real one and it has a few dimensions. One is the
case of an app you use every day where click minimization is the number one
thing. The other is the app that you use only occasionally and the user's long
term memory is the bottleneck. One trouble is that even the app you use every
day probably has some corner that you go into every six months, so even that
kind of app has learning curve issues that don't go away.

~~~
TeMPOraL
In serious software for serious work there is a simple way to cut down the
learning curve - training sessions. Instead of dumbing down the UI and slowing
everyone down, you can just take new employees to a few hours long session
where they get familiarized with the parts of the tool they need for the job.

------
dyoder
Many of these responses hilariously demonstrate why enterprise software
interaction design is so poor: the market simply doesn't care.

The root cause is not that enterprise software vendors have no taste, it's
that the stakeholders involved in the procurement process don't value
interaction design. Like any market, it's likely that the vendors that are
successful value those things that their customers value, and interaction
design is not one of those things.

The vendors that are passionate about design eventually do something else,
because their work isn't valued by the enterprise market. The vendors that
remain in the market either don't value design or aren't committed to it. And,
by extension, the best designers don't stick around in companies where their
talents aren't valued.

------
jakobegger
I see two problems:

1) Beautiful design takes lots of effort. Making sure that texts and buttons
align, choosing color schemes, takes a lot of time. A large fraction of the
code is UI code, so minimizing the amount of time spent on coding the UI is a
quick way to safe time and money.

2) Beautiful design requires authority. When you make a twitter client, you
can just scrap that confusing feature that noone will use. In enterprise
world, you need to implement every stupid feature the client wants even if it
makes the product worse. No amount of taste or design can fix an interface
that is broken in principle.

------
indymike
Enterprise software is designed to demo well (that means lots of well exposed
one dimensional features) and differentiate against competitors in
demos/shootouts. Everything else is secondary - design, usability. This makes
it easy to sell, but leads to high levels of dissatisfaction - (i.e. the 80%
failure rate of CRM or ERP or ATS software).

~~~
rushabh
I will take it one step further. Enterprise software is designed to "sell". In
enterprise software, the buyer and the user are not the same person and the
buyer has the power. That is why enterprise software sales is so bloated.

We build and sell enterprise software and our strength is design. The way we
work around this problem is that we are selling only to early adopters and
have also open sourced our product. We are not getting the big bucks, but its
starting to show result.

------
awkward
The non-design is often a feature and a selling point for these vendors.

There are some simple reasons that these might go against current trends in
design - for example, these need to be high-information density displays, not
minimalist showpieces. This gives plenty of room to ship something that is
suboptimal, but to market it to the customer as clearly more functional,
BECAUSE it's ugly.

I really think that UX can be improved, and better design could squeeze more
efficiency out of these systems, but this thought process - that ugly directly
means functional - actually does move a lot of software.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I literally was at a talk from an AXIS Communications salesperson yesterday.
They advocated their never-changing web UI as a feature, and everyone agreed
it was one.

~~~
kayfox
If you mean the company that makes the network cameras, it is kinda nice that
you don't have to change your code for every new camera or version of
software.

Sometimes what works does not need to be changed,* especially when your
talking physical security, where a camera system may be installed for upwards
of 20 years. Oh, and guards who still don't know how to operate it.

* In this case I think they have made substantial changes behind the scenes to fix security holes, but the UI remains the same.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Yup.

------
zenpaul
I've developed many enterprise software solutions over the years. In my
experience, there's a fundamental tradeoff in enterprise software (and
software in general) that has to do with the number and sophistication of
users.

Basically, if you have lots and lots of unsophisticated users, you HAVE to
spend time on design to make it intuitive so you are not overwhelmed with
customer support issues. If you have a few, more sophisticated users (that
often require a more complex interaction with the data) you can get away with
a simple interface and make up for it in training or customer support.

It's a simple cost-benefit tradeoff that enterprises with limited resources
make all the time.

Given that, I agree that much enterprise is needlessly badly designed. I can
look at systems and tell that nobody even mocked up the screens before the
programmers started coding.

~~~
MaggieL
Mocking the screens would require that there be a design. Having a design
would require...well, _requirements_.

Too few internal enterprise development environments manage to do these
things. So an enterprise product with beautiful design is at a disadvantage
for all the reasons other have noted, but also because it breaks the branding
of the suite of enterprise software in which it becomes embedded, makes the
rest of it look bad, and draws attention to the fact that the local IT
department had to go out and buy something. :-) .

------
DanBC
I'd love to see some "better" designs. Good design is hard, and it's worth
paying a good designer to do the work, but often designers will make something
look nicer whilst making it harder to use or a lot more resource intensive. I
regularly have to load hundreds of kbs of stuff just so someone can show me a
design feature that has no function. to be clear: I'm not talking about line
spacing (which makes things easier to read) or font colours (which can improve
contrast) or some javascript that actually does something.

tldr designers need to start calling out the bad design, not just un-designed
software.

> Rational Team Concert has home icon in top corner. Why?

So many product blogs make the mistake of having the big icon linking to the
home of the blog, not the home of the product. Link to the product.

------
crazygringo
This is really quite simple. It's not worth it from a cost-benefit analysis.

Good design takes a lot of effort and a lot of money. Good UI is _really hard_
, and means spending salaries on extra people.

Good design is important if that's a competitive differentiator, which is
usually the case in _consumer_ apps/objects.

For enterprise software purchases, buying decisions are made on functionality,
not design. So why would an enterprise software company waste resources on
design that could go toward additional functionality, bugfixes, etc.?

Saying:

> _Is it so hard to add correct spaces between form element and labels? No, it
> is not, but nobody cares._

is ridiculous. First of all, yes it _is_ hard, because most developers are not
trained in design, and then programming good layout actually takes a _lot_ of
effort as well. And secondly, many people _do_ care, but it's just not a smart
business prioritization of resources.

~~~
coldcode
If these products were cheap I could buy this argument. But I see stuff
licensing for 6 or 7 figures with UX from hell. The problem is that the people
who are forced to use this crap are not the "customer" who pays for it, is
sold on it, meets about the purchase, or cares about usability.

~~~
smackfu
Just because the customer isn't the end user doesn't mean they are some
disinterested party. Often they are writing requirements that the end user
doesn't even care about, because this software has to fit into the existing
software ecosystem at the megacorp. Stuff like LDAP, SAML, and ERP
integration. And also provably meet corporate standards, and work on the
corporations reference hardware architecture, etc.

------
ebbv
Good design is subjective. What you or I might think is good design, someone
else will think is wasteful because it has too much white space.

Believe it or not, the customers for enterprise software usually want the
software to pack as much information onto a single page. It might look nasty
to you, but it's what the customer wants.

That's not to say it couldn't be organized better or cleaner, everything can
always be improved.

But you're mistaking your own opinion for universal fact.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Exactly. The designer obsession with whitespace is basically a cancer to tech
products. I go out of my way to find software that was made by an enterprise
vendor, ideally one that has no designers on staff. o_o

~~~
MrDosu
It's those people that want to remove gridlines from spreadsheets, because
pretty...

------
jamiesonbecker
Information-rich screens can reduce clicks and save massive amounts of time,
but it's very hard to design information rich interfaces that don't clog your
forest for the trees. Add in a requirement that the screen needs to be
responsive and work well on mobile, and what was a heavy lift before becomes
massive.

For example, [https://Userify.com](https://Userify.com) has a very simple (and
rather prosaic) interface with not a lot of tools, but it's easier and faster
for people to pick up than trying to hook authentication in their Linux boxes
to Active Directory or LDAP.

The next release, by necessity, will be more complex and powerful because it's
getting an approximate metric ton more functionality. We'll try to balance
that by fixing the blah design and color scheme, but balancing info-rich
interface against functionality on varying size screens is just really hard.

Even so, the author is right -- but _form follows function_ still applies. I'd
rather have an ugly, but fast and functional, interface over a beautiful and
weak interface any day. The app that succeeds in both will be most successful.

Ultimately it's an optimization problem.

------
voidhorse
I can confirm, that, at least at some companies, more time has been devoted to
ux, and now ui.

If I am correct, I think they've always shot for good ux, but ui was usually
secondary. Now they have focused on ui a lot more, and companies have even
begun incorporating an extensive styleguide for the user facing components
(something that would noramlly be done for a webapp or website by a front end
dev, but is usually neglected in enterprise apps). ux has also been refined.

Legacy products are probably not getting extreme make overs any time
soon(because of existing customer base, but you never know), but I would not
be surprised if we begin to see other developers of enterprise level software
begin to pay more attention to UX/UI and likely mimic the look and feel of web
apps created by what were originally smaller companies. We are at the point
where enterprises are not only using domain specific applications, but have
employees familiar with webapps like twitter, facebook, etc., all of which
blow a lot of older enterprise products out of the water design wise.

Essentially, customers expect more on the design side these days, and I think
enterprise devs will begin to attempt to meet that expectation to the extent
that they can.

(I've even seen enterprise apps that have started using what I would term
'cutesy' user facing messages. There's probably a technical ux term for it but
a good example would be github's "github <3's you' or whatever they display
when you sign up--stuff like that, or giving the user a pat on the back when
they run a function like 'good work!' stuff you'd never imagine would appear
in enterprise level apps is creeping in because of the sheer popularity of
webapps like twitter, etc.)

------
csears
Are there examples of enterprise software with "good taste"? I'm sure someone
out there must be doing it correctly.

I agree that the interfaces from the screenshots looked cluttered, but I think
a contrasting shot of a properly designed enterprise app would have made for a
stronger argument.

~~~
totalrobe
Atlassian products are pretty and functional to boot.

~~~
mercury_craze
SourceTree is obviously the exception to this rule.

------
leppr
Most people have no taste, that's all there is to it. Minimal and clear visual
design has just started to get mainstream, just pick any piece of amateur GUI
software at random and there's only a 1/1000 chance it won't be ugly. Even the
most used GUIs in the world (Windows/OSX/Android/iOS) are full of little
imperfections and nonsensical design decisions. One day software will be
important enough that everything we use everyday will have been designed
carefully, this isn't the case yet.

------
trymas
It's quite simple.

1\. Enterprise needs vast amount of custom, specific features

2\. It must be universal, to be able to do any business operations.

3\. Good design costs, businesses want features, not designs (reasonably
good/usable design is enough), thus save money

In my experience, specs change on the go, due to how much customization
business want, this is really hard to manage on the back-end, if you'll need
to do this on the front-end, development cost raises dramatically. Reasonably
good, and extensible design usually is more than enough.

------
suttree
It's true.

My concern is that well designed, tasteful and thoughtful services are seen as
hipster. I'd imagine that anything with a font size that is readable can be
dismissed as hipster bullshit by enterprise clients. Even gov.uk was derided
for having a clean design.

But, we've seen many times that our enterprise clients are drawn towards the
design of somewhere.com, they want to use something that was built to be
enjoyed. Taste is a barrier.

------
jbigelow76
Sorry for the snarky nit picking but...

One of the critiqued UIs includes the following annotation:

 _Rational Team Concert has home icon in top corner. Why?_

Surely the author wouldn't be so indeterminate in their own design right?

 _Targetprocess 3 has a user gravatar in the top left corner. Why?_

(Actually Targetprocess looks like it has a very nice UI, but then again I
don't find the others all that horrendous either. There's just no accounting
for taste.)

~~~
tablet
Targetprocess design is definitely not perfect and there are many areas that
are ugly and outdated. We face the same problem as all other vendors. However,
we do try to design better and better and almost all of our new solutions are
better than the old ones.

Taste is personal. I think these applications have no taste.

------
HarveyKandola
Enterprise software procurement will shift thanks to SaaS and the ability of
teams/departments to buy what they need quickly. More and more, this is a
means to bypass the formal, long-winded procurement process.

Hence pricing SaaS to sit below team credit card spend limit helps.

That's when polished, 'tasteful' and usable software should win.

~~~
acveilleux
Just look at JIRA... It's ubiquitous, cloud based, ugly and bad user
experience. It's still successful.

~~~
matthewmacleod
I think the UX and design of Jira and the rest of the Atlassian tools is
pretty good. It's reasonably clean and consistent while being customisable as
required.

If anything, I'd use Jira as an example of what enterprise software _should_
be like! It's hardly perfect, but I s better than almost every other non-tech-
oriented SaaS I've used.

~~~
acveilleux
I think it's the enterprisey configurability really. A lot of the instances
I've had to use were confusing messes with local OK parts, I wouldn't be
surprised if some combination of configuration yielded much better usability.

Bugzilla is obviously very ugly (and directly out of the 1990s) but it does
work pretty well and it's fairly logical to use.

------
thebouv
Another reason is needing to support old browsers in SaaS for enterprise. All
the new sparkles and rainbows are great design, but often also require the
newest browsers to really use.

I've never worked in an enterprise environment that didn't still have to
support IE8. Enterprises are slow to move on this.

------
vaskebjorn
Yet another reason for this not already mentioned is that some enterprise
customers actually expect these ugly interfaces. This horrible ie 6/7
aesthetic has come to signify what "enterprise" software looks like, and it's
what's expected.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Quick, efficient, and functional. That's what I expect of enterprise software,
yes. It should have lots of options, and no useless cruft like CSS,
JavaScript, etc.

------
smackfu
I wouldn't be shocked if a lot of these companies literally have no designers
working on these products. Just engineers laying out UI similar to what is
already in the product, based on the requirements. Any art assets come from
stock libraries.

~~~
chuck8088
Yeah, you pretty much nailed it.

When a boss sends an email and says 'use an image like this' \- you use that
image.

I suggested hiring a designer, just for some of the most used features and all
I got was 'yeah, okay, hmmm'

------
wooyi
Have you ever changed the UI on a legacy Enterprise app. The reaction from the
Windows 8 UI changes is a taste of it.

Customers hate change. They have been trained on the legacy UI. You change the
UI you make their job harder (at least that's the perception).

------
retrogradeorbit
It's not that enterprise software vendors have no taste, it's just that taste
is not a factor in the business of selling the software. And taste costs, so
why spend money on something that brings zero return. Enterprise software
vendors are looking at their own product and going, gee, that's ugly, but hey,
look at our bank balance. More of that!

Consumer software, totally different story. But this is enterprise. As an
enterprise employee, you're not paid to sit there blissing out on how good
your screen looks on a rounded corner tech gadget. You are paid to do your
job, whatever that is. Whatever increases that metric is what wins.

------
zwieback
Most enterprise apps are truly ugly but what matters isn't looks but how many
clicks or clacks it takes to get a specific task done. If you use the same app
every day it hardly matters how pretty or even intuitive the app is.

~~~
yuchi
Actually this is true and it isn’t. I mean, for sure ‘how intuitive’ is not a
good metric for enterprise products, which usually come along with a big bunch
of days for training, because you have a small number of users, somehow forced
to use your product for a long time.

If you’re investing in reducing the ‘time to learn’ (learn the semantics of
your product) you’re probably focusing on the wrong thing.

Yet, all these products (and I work on those a lot) are not well designed as a
symptom of missing care for the “cognitive cost” for the user.

Anyway, the products listed in the post are way better than others. Which is
sad :\

------
craigching
While I agree with the premise of the post, I do think that the use of design
is changing in enterprise software. All of those products have been around for
awhile now and I think that the idea that you need designers and good design
is just a relatively new concept for ESVs. I can see it happening at my own
company, a couple of years ago UX wasn't really something we considered, but
now we are hiring UX people for all of our products. So I think you'll see
this change going forward, it's just the enterprise is always the last to join
the game.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Or the reality is, you _don 't_ need designers, but the hipster crowd
convinced companies they do, because they needed something to do with their
art degrees they'd get paid for.

------
djrogers
Hiring has something to do with this in the current climate as well. If you
find a dev with good UI/design chops odds are against you hiring him/her to
build a UI for an invisible B2B/enterprise company in the Bay Area. Most of
the people fitting that description seem to want to go to a VC backed startup
building the next world changing Uber-of-SoLoMo app something or other.

------
pessimizer
I really think all of these interfaces look entirely adequate. I can imagine
being able to easily use all of them without much training. There's really no
comparison to the stuff I was trying to use 5-10 years ago, which tended to
the illogical and unusable.

I guess I have no taste? I'm glad I'm not an interior designer.

------
tindrlabs
Enterprise software is just a reflection of enterprises in general. A lot of
the left hand doesn't know the what the right is doing, duplication of work,
etc.

Where a lot of consumer software maps towards what a human would do naturally
without the constraints of business.

------
tybulewicz
I'd say that B2C apps are designed by small commited team while huge apps for
B2B are designed by committee and developed by many separate teams focused on
different aspects of application.

------
twunde
Unfortunately another contributing factor is that many enterprise websites or
applications have to support old versions of ie. My company is still
supporting XP due to a particular partner.

------
retrogradeorbit
I would like to see the OP do mock redesigns of these sites they've picked,
showing by example how these designs could be improved.

------
bsbechtel
What about the re-designed Quickbooks Online released last Spring/Summer? Is
that not considered enterprise software?

~~~
tonyarkles
Call it whatever you want... I love it. I think I (unintentionally) signed up
for it shortly after the redesign. At the start it felt like there were a few
things that should have been easier to find than they were, but it has quickly
and subtly evolved.

I didn't think I'd ever say this, but the new QBO has been by far the least
painful small business accounting software I've used. Very very impressed!

~~~
bsbechtel
It was a bit of a learning curve from the old layout, and I still think
there's a gap between what it is and what it could one day be, but I agree
that it is certainly better than 99% of enterprise software applications. QBO
also serves a market where the line between consumer applications and
enterprise applications is less clear.

------
ThomaszKrueger
As a target process user, I have to agree with the assessment that Enterprise
Software has no taste.

