Comments on: Good UI or New Web Hubris?

By: Jake

Jake — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 16:17:31 +0000

@Ted: Thanks for sharing your experiences. Did you know Paul used to run PeopleSoft Portal? I think Rich was a developer on that product too.

UI is an 80/20 problem. There are so many types and levels of users that it’s virtually impossible to please everyone. I used to do technical consulting, which included Form design/build in R11 EBS. It was surprisingly tough to please even a handful of users with a Form built totally to their specs.

That’s UI for you. We did keep the pen, albeit within a button.

By: Ted Simpson

Ted Simpson — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 11:59:23 +0000

Usability testing seems a slippery thing to me; I sat in on a usability testing session recently on some new web apps we are building. The pros running the session seemed to have 2 responses: if the testing results were positive, they high-fived each other because their UI design was great; if the testing results were negative, they explained that the UI features would be adopted by “learned behavior” in time. Either way, the testing did not prompt changes to the UI. I asked them why they did testing at all if the results weren’t actionable. They told me I “didn’t get it”.

It takes discipline and nerve to put something new out; when we rolled out our PeopleSoft Portal 9.0 last fall, we did not make dramatic changes based on individual user comments — reasoning instead that the research we did with our user base to develop the new UI and IA was solid and trustworthy. Now those UI and IA features have been adopted.

Another example of UI gone wild is PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.0. This is the best UI yet in ERP applications (I say); but, we had complaints from users when we first rolled it out that there were too many ways to navigate (enterprise menu navigation, embedded links, contextual search, and contextual navigation all on the same page). We noted that these were the same users who complained that navigation in prior version used to be too basic for their sophisticated needs and moved on.

I suppose it is a balance. The AppsLab experiences and blog are helpful and instructive to us who are moving into the NEW world, so thanks.

For what it is worth — I liked the pen icon

-Ted

By: Paul Pedrazzi

Paul Pedrazzi — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:38:26 +0000

Yes the icon was a change that didn’t work. The great thing is that the nature of how we work and the ability of the web to connect us, told us immediately. We didn’t have to wait months to find out. I would also stress that it’s the participatory model that is different now - not so much the UI. Personally, I have always felt that icons were a bit more 1.0 in the sense of what you’d see on a typical client app. The simple links as buttons (ie. click to save) I find very clean, simple, and intuitive.

That said, there is another lesson here. One that anyone who deals with customers knows. If you hear a complaint from one person, there are 10 more that didn’t bother to say anything, but were unhappy nonetheless. This goes for restaurants, dentists, and yes even software. So when we heard quickly from 5 or 10 people, we jumped, and jumped high.

Paul