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Ask Slashdot: Convincing a Team To Undertake UX Enhancements On a Large Codebase?

Posted by timothy on from the tough-row-to-hoe dept.

unteer writes: I work at a enterprise software company that builds an ERP system for a niche industry (i.e. not Salesforce or SAP size). Our product has been continuously developed for 10 years, and incorporates code that is even older. Our userbase is constantly expanding, and many of these users expect modern conveniences like intuitive UI and documented processes. However, convincing the development teams that undertaking projects to clean up the UI or build more self-explanatory features are often met with, "It's too big an undertaking," or, "it's not worth it." Help me out: What is your advice for how to quantify and qualify improving the user experience of an aging, fairly large,but also fairly niche, ERP product?

1 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Go Work for the Competition by LinuxIsGarbage · · Score: 3, Funny

    Your product UI stinks. Sooner or later someone will come along with a better product and eat your lunch. Your customers hate your product because of the bad UI. The business is at extreme risk.

    So find out who the competition is and get a job there.

    Debatable. We use Oracle at work. It's up there with SAP in market-share, but its UI is awful. So unless that's the product the submitter works for, crappy UI doesn't prevent people from buying your ERP package.

    To start with it runs in Java, so every time you go to launch it you need to accept the same Java warning (checkbox, then run). Then there's the general poor performance of Java. Some of the errors are completely non-nonsensical. Search queries that were available in the previous version are no longer available (so the same task takes 10x as long to perform). "Export to Excel" actually exports to CSV, but saved with an XLS extension, so Excel annoys you when you open it. The steps to perform any task are so non-intuitive I have a HowTo document dedicated to step by step through tasks I might only perform every few months. On some search queries when you "go-back" to the query from the results to refine the search, some of the fields have in-explicitly been cleared.