Tag Archive for 'user interface'

Does design matter in a UI?

Published by Ben Kepes on August 18, 2008 in Business, Design and IT. 11 Comments

Interesting post over on Dennis’ blog about design. He quotes some peoples perspectives on whether UI is an important attribute for an offering. In relation to enterprise UIs, Natalie Hanson says;

For the most part, an EUI doesn’t have to win over its users.  An employee is essentially trapped – they need to get their job done, and there is only one system available to execute their work.  So for business systems, we may not see poor UI reflect in adoption statistics, but the problems will show in time-to-task completion, data quality, or lack usage for non-required tasks

Which I agree with – the fact that enterprise solutions are generally decided upon from on high, leads to a degree of entrapment and the acceptance of a poor experience.

Dennis then comments that;

I’m surprised. In the SMB world, users do not tolerate poor UIs. They simply eschew the products

Which is interesting given some previous posts here about UIs and whether they really matter. The fact is that I believe that Dennis is wrong when he says that SMBs are any less trapped than enterprises – the pain to change for an SME is similar to the inability to change in an enterprise – so the bottom line is that while UIs matter, they matter most when getting folks to sign up to your offering – thereafter your UI could look like a cross between the back end of a bus and the awful face of your first grade teacher but you’d still persevere.

Don’t agree? Just have a look at the mass market around you!

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Ten best UIs awarded

Published by Ben Kepes on August 12, 2008 in Business, Design, IT and SaaS. 2 Comments

With a twitter hat-tip (a twhit maybe) to Stuart for pointing it out, the Neilsen Norman Group has awarded it’s bouquets for the ten best UIs of 2008. Good to see on-demand well represented and great to see our very own Xero take a spot. I use two of the solutions daily (Xero and SugarSync) and both are designs with great intuitive flow and interaction to the forefront.

The top ten were;

  • Campaign Monitor by Eyeblaster (Israel): integrated management of multiple advertising campaigns for media buyers.
  • CMSBox by CMSBox (Switzerland): content management system.
  • FotoFlexer by Arbor Labs (USA): photo editor.
  • PRISMAprepare by Océ (Netherlands): print shop software.
  • Seating Management by Magellan Network and DesignBox (USA): hostess stand reservation book for restaurants.
  • SQL diagnostic manager by Idera (USA): database performance monitoring and diagnostics.
  • SugarSync by Sharpcast (USA): synchronizing files across multiple computers.
  • SuperSaaS by SuperSaaS (Netherlands): creating and hosting scheduling and reservation systems.
  • Wufoo by Infinity Box, Inc. (USA): online forms, surveys, invitations, and payments.
  • Xero by Xero (New Zealand): accounting for small businesses.

The entire report can be downloaded here (for the not insignificant sum of $98). It does look like a very comprehensive report so valuable for those in the UI design field out there.

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