There is one thing that makes software suck, and that's how far apart its developers and users are. I dream of going to SAP's offices in Germany and seeing how they book their own vacation and submit their own expenses. I can't believe they do it with their own product, or it would be slick...
the users are not the target group for enterprise software.
expenses is a great example, it needs to accomodate so many different regulations, compliance issues, legacy compatibility needs within an implementation, that it can't be more than a generic shell in vanilla SAP. so you need consultants to set it up in the first place. what do they do? ask the client's project team to tell what they want...and this is why all enterprise software implementations produce shit outcomes. non-software people having a direct say on UI/UX.
There certainly can be a disconnect which impacts a developers ability to see what a user wants, but even if there is no disconnect, bad software can still result.
Consider internal software - there is literally no disconnect whatsoever, but very often the software is terrible. This is relevant because it raises the issue that the business simply may not care about quality, and thus putting in the work required to make the thing good might simply not be possible.
There are many, many factors involved in determining whether software sucks or not, and key is the understanding or lack thereof of what the users want and need, agreed. But keep in mind, there is a big difference between seeing what the users' need superficially vs. understanding clearly and deeply what the users' need and implementing it well.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record: Paper protoyping. Even if it's for yourself, it never feels the same to interact with a product than you think it will. This holds even more true when it's for other people.
For internal projects, investment is obviously a huge problem, and once you've built the wrong thing you're unlikely to get more money to do it right. But for a given price point, there's a huge range of quality you can obtain. Paper protoyping helps you maximize that at very low expense.
absolutely. I worked for a few years at a place that used SAP for everything HR related. I still recall the pain of trying to record a sick day or book a day off (for extra points, try a half day!)
we also used a ticket tracking packages called, I think, CAMS. possibly a CA product. oh, and we used Harvest for source control. I still recall the joy in learning CAMS would be replaced, and the horror that followed as we came to grips with ManageNow. Never dreamt I'd wish for CAMS to return, but I did.
So, yes, I agree. I can't believe the companies that peddle this crap actually use it.
