

Ask HN: Why is UX being so important yet so overlooked by businesses? - fredwu

Even for large enterprises with enough $$$ to spend, a good portion of them either don't really get what UX is about, or have really bad UX despite having 'pretty bells and whistles'.<p>Is it because of UX's intangible nature and therefore is difficult to measure? Or is it because businesses simply do not understand or care about it enough?<p>What is your opinion?
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alttag
I've written a couple of papers about this (not intended for publication), and
spent some time investing the project management and development arm of the
organization I was with. Some of my thoughts are these:

1\. Cost focus. In a cost-focused organization (as opposed to revenue-
focused), such as universities and certain enterprises (mostly, IMNSHO, large
SaaS enterprises), much of the development is performed by lowest-cost
developers, meaning those without UX experience or training.

2\. Training. Project managers don't know better. In order for the PM
"customer" to evaluate good UX, (s)he must know what good UX is. Without some
exposure to heuristics to evaluate a good US, it won't ever be a consideration
in planning or accepting the project.

3\. The larger the organization, the more likely the PM "customer" is not an
actual user of the product. Corollary: the larger the organization, the
greater the likely distance between the developers and the customers.

4\. Inertia. Some large companies still use terminal systems or require IE6.
It's more difficult to change than it should be.

5\. User lock-in; lack of substitutions. In environments where users don't get
to choose which system to use (e.g., students using a university's learning
management or registration system) and can't turn to substitutes, the
incidence of poor UX seems higher. These are also situations where users have
little bargaining power relative to the developers.

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brittonrt
In my opinion there is little in the way of yardstick metrics for UX quality.
I definitely do not think it's because businesses don't understand the
importance. The existence of buzzwords like UX are in fact evidence that
businesses recognize it's importance. But how do you subjectively quantify the
quality of user experience/interface design? It's difficult at best for the
smartest of us, as it inevitably requires both designing for the lowest common
denominator (amongst your userbase) while at the same time streamlining for
the most experienced of users.

In my personal opinion your assertion that it's overlooked by business is not
really accurate... it's more that business people don't know how to approach
UX design, nor how to recognize talent in UX design.

Just my 2 cents.

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dholowiski
Because it's hard, and just throwing money at it doesn't make it any easier.

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bmelton
While I agree with alttag's comment a million percent, I think you'd be
surprised how often companies DO actual UI/UX, just not in the way that we
think.

Enterprise UX isn't about making the product easier to use, it's about making
it more efficient to use, in most cases. I remember working for a large
Fortune enterprise company many years ago, and they had a product that, simply
put, was for customer, bug and issue tracking. There are a dozen or so REALLY
good startups in this scene now (there weren't then) and they're all radically
easier to use than the product we had, because they focus on the kind of UI/UX
you're talking about.

That said, there was a laser sharp focus on making the product more efficient
to use. We hired consultants to use the product extensively, and determined
that moving some of the buttons around was a more efficient workflow. We
determined that DEcreasing the font size allowed for more information to be on
the screen at a given time, which allowed highly trained personnel the ability
to do work more quickly than if they had to constantly scroll back and forth.
Things like this fly in the face of what is largely considered good now, but
was not only a priority, but a highly flaunted (and appreciated) selling
point.

The biggest difference is the customer. Most of the SaaS customers are for
things that aren't used religiously, or by a lot of undertrained /
underqualified people. If you have a help desk for a 50,000 person company,
chances are you're not going to use FogBugz and the like to run your company
with. You're going to have something in-house, and you're going to train your
people to use scripts, and you're going to have a really efficient (if not
necessarily GOOD) help desk that uses these tools day in, day out, repeatedly.
They get to learn the product well enough that they don't have to look at it
to use it. They learn it as well as most of us know how to type. They know
that they can enter last name, tab, first name, tab tab tab phone number enter
and voila, there's the customer record.

Edit: This was supposed to be a reply to
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3052236>

