Pat’s Point of View

Please never say enterprise software again. I don’t really like enterprise software. Pretend you’re making consumer software. [...] Make software for people in big companies.

Jonathan Grubb (at CHI 2007)

So true. Engineers and techies who build the underlying system might need to think of the whole enterprise—in terms of performance, capacity, reliability—but when it comes to designing the functionality and interface, the people who will use it should be the focus.

Ironically, on the same day I thought about blogging this quote, I did observe a woman on my bus reading a memo entitled User Guide for Simplified Sign-on for XYZ Mainframe (or something to that effect). The memo was about six pages long, crammed with fairly dodgy looking annotated screenshots and quite a lot of instructions, with many bolded sentences.

I thought to myself, if it’s the ’simplified’ version then why does it need such lengthy explanation? By the look of that memo I would say it was far from simplified and far from anything I would want to roll out across a major financial institution (and yes, ‘XYZ’ is definitely a pseudonym in this case).

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