I’m thinking of making this one of my career goals - making enterprise software not suck.

It’s not just that it isn’t “sexy”, its just that usability is not a high enough priority. In fact, I find that in lots of software.

One of the traps in engineering large-scale software, is specifying the UI. You can’t specify a look-and-feel - you can’t specify usability. Not easily, anyway. This is something you need to experiment with - this is where prototyping and agile process excel.

The other trap is using a tight design and spec for the other functionality of the system. As such, the UI is left to the wayside. In this scenario, the UI is only required to provide access to the functionality. This is one path to the situation where the UI is implemented in a way that makes sense to a developer, or to the system, rather than the user.

In fact, this problem isn’t just in enterprise software - too much software is like this.

Related to this, is the issue of tightly coupling the UI with the lower tiers. This can tie the functionality to the usability. A UI needs to be flexible so you can refine it. A user action is not always 1:1 with a system function.

If software has users, it requires usability. Think about the use cases from a user’s perspective. Think of what the user intends to do, what information they expect to have to provide, what actions they expect to perform to achieve this, and what format will the end result take. Also think of how they will discover features - what need will drive them to seek a specific feature, what button (or other UI element) will they look for and where they will start looking for it.

The other trap is not refining a UI. The first cut is never good.

Yet another trap - developers know how to use their own software - they know how it works because they built it. Test drive it with someone else. See how they attempt to use it, and how they actually use it.

Still more traps - for god’s sake keep your UI’s simple.
- be flexible in your input
- don’t clutter the screen
- make features obvious
- don’t whinge at the user unless you really have to
- actually write human error messages
- use common UI metaphors that the target user will be familiar with
- make it fast

You haven’t used non-breaking spaces for your thousand’s seperators in $50 000 and $300 000. In firefox fullscreened 1280 * 1024 line breaks after the 50, so was reading this as
… - if spending another $50
000 makes your $300 000 CMS …

Kind of read it as ‘if spending another $50, emergency number makes your $300 000 CMS …’