A decade ago when I ran web agency Splandigo with a couple of associates, I was in charge of building or maintaining software for the company. Most of the design work went to the front-end of sites, and it’s only late in the game that we started investing in “skinning” our content management system a little bit.
What mattered was the functionality, and the usability of the interfaces, such a vital topic for consumer-facing elements, became a much lower priority. We did give it some thought and worked on it, but it never received anywhere near the same amount of investment or attention.
We often worked on customizing an interface so it was really specialized for the task at hand, i.e. maybe ugly, but extremely clear for its operators because it supports exactly what they’re supposed to do, and maps to their mental model of their work.
Also, because you have so few users and they don’t have a choice whether to use the system or not, you can address the poor usability of an interface through training and documentation. This is increasingly uncommon in consumer-facing services, but remains standard in much of business software, with a few exceptions.
I often rant about Lotus Notes, IBM’s email, calendar, and bureaucracy-support platform, because its interface is riddled with confusing and impractical idiosyncrasies, poorly abstracted or explained technical details, and also because the level of polish of the interface is nowhere near as good as its mass-market competitors. Yet IBM is a huge, and hugely successful business software and consulting company.
SAP, an immensely successful competitor of IBM, is dubbed Systems Against People by some of its users, who find its interface daunting and error-prone, its flexibility severely limited, and find little joy in interacting with it. In both cases, poor implementation may be to blame, but consumer-inspired models are clearly superior.
But both of these companies, and all of their competitors, produce software its users are forced to use.
Having the choice between many options, consumers can afford to be fickle and shop around until they find a service they like. As a result, immense investments are made into creating moments of joy in using those services. Don’t like Facebook’s privacy issues? Switch to Path. Can’t be bothered with Flickr’s focus on the desktop? Jump ship to Instagram. Usability is a very large factor in the success of those services.
Users of business software are not usually consulted in the selection of that business software, the choice is made by the software’s maintainers instead. As long as a program’s goals are met (i.e. can we actually manage our product catalog online with this e-commerce platform?), the CTO’s job is done. The satisfaction of the operator is irrelevant, and therefore nobody bothers to design for it.
I believe there’s a business opportunity here. Of course, training has a hard cost, and while it’s hard to quantify accurately, I am convinced there’s a cost to user frustration, in productivity and good will.
But there’s an even more powerful element: the learning gap. When you divorce the purpose from the gesture, when you increase the distance between your action and its consequences, learning can’t happen. You are still capable of performing the action (with enough training and sense of duty, we’ll perform the most meaningless, most intricate acts), but you’ll never get any better at it, nor will you ever contribute to the field.
Practically: if the tool with which I create a promotion does not offer me a clear view of that promotion’s performance, I’m going to have to go seek that information out myself. I’ll probably do it anyway because it’s my job and I’ve been trained, but my work is clearly less efficient, and it limits opportunities for implicit learning.
If the platform isn’t even trying to learn from its users but just forces itself on them, it means the collective knowledge that is being built up by all the operators carrying out their tasks every day is being left on the table.
And the more esoteric the platform, the fewer chances it has to create joy for its operators. And that’s too bad because joy for the company’s staff is a powerful raw material to foster more effective work and increase consumer satisfaction.
So here are a couple of principles I’ll be pursuing here at ASICS for our e-commerce project over the next few months, as we are choosing a platform:
- first, pick a partner that understands the issue, and is committed to tackling it
- group tools around tasks, and align tasks with overall program goals, to encourage effective activity
- embed performance testing and measurement into operational tools, to make learning constant and easy
- give users the ability to change their environment and make their own tools, but still offer great defaults
- involve operators, observe them, iterate and optimize, just as we would for consumer-facing systems
And I want to call out Demandware for having identified the issue and being in the process of addressing it (kudos!), and Hybris for having started as well. The other guys out there, I think you’re letting your clients leave money on the table.
Voting for expat MPs
Yesterday (in America) and today (elsewhere outside of metropolitan France), French citizens registered before 31 December 2011 with their consulate were able to vote for a member of parliament. For the first time, the French living abroad will have dedicated representatives in the lower house (we could previously vote in France through awkward arrangements).
I live in the 11th district of the French-abroad, covering Russia, much of Asia, and Australia. 20 candidates were competing: 8 from established parties (no common candidates were fielded here, either by the parliamentary right nor by the “presidential majority” leftist parties, which is quite common inside France), and 12 others (a very high number, but not uncommon abroad).
While some of my friends voted online (also a first, fraught with technical issues and the worrying requirement to downgrade your Java virtual machine), I know of a couple who did not vote, while they had in the presidential election a couple of weeks ago.
An interesting issue was the emails sent by the candidates to the voters, as authorized by the French state who supplied the data on CDs (first and last name, date of birth, email address, home address).
Obviously, email is cheaper and more effective than paper propaganda (I didn’t receive the official campaign material on time for the presidential election, for example). Outsourcing the sending to the candidates is not a bad idea either (they have to print their own campaign material, although the state mails it to the voters, in one bundle).
But email marketing has rules — some of which have been translated into law, but many of which are simply understood by people, especially in Europe — such as the need for prior approval before “spamming” your recipients.
And this campaign has broken the rule: it wasn’t really possible to opt out of the emails. Some candidates did supply the option, but it was up to them to honor it, and there was no easy way to opt out of the whole election communication.
This is a beautiful real-life example of the pitfalls of old lists and gathering mailing authorizations offline: even if, technically, the candidates had voters’ approval, many experienced the mails as unsolicited and unwelcome.
Politics sometimes takes a page from commercial digital marketing in a very interesting way (the Obama campaign of ’08 and perhaps to a lesser but nonetheless worthy degree, the work done around Hollande this year). However, heavy-handed or tone-deaf tactics can backfire in a way that affects democratic processes. The participation rate in an election isn’t just another conversion goal.