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.
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.
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.
When JIRA started it was beautiful when compared to other available options (bugzilla, for example). JIRA's UI was a major competitive advantage in the beginning. These days, it looks and feels terrible, IMHO.
Unfortunately the mandated apps the company uses are still going to be pretty shitty as long as they are selling those to management instead of the teams.
For instance, the example with the home button immediately reminded me of Sharepoint.
What's safer than imitating SP in the corporate hegemony? (bland, overcomplex for its purpose, incredibly frustrating workflows)
Could someone tell me exactly what was wrong with the home icon in the top corner? I'm not defending the design - it looks like crap, but I couldn't put my finger on why that particular bit was wrong. There's a home icon top left in my browser as I type this.
Hence pricing SaaS to sit below team credit card spend limit helps.
That's when polished, 'tasteful' and usable software should win.