Joe Lamantia.com

Don't Cross the Streams! The Terrible User Experience of Enterprise Software

Below is an excerpt from an email sent to all employees - a 'global broadcast', very Max Headroom... - of a larger company (name removed), in response to repeated plees to improve the nightmarish user experience of the time and expense system that all employees must use.

<begin transmission>
There have been a few issues with the submitting and/or processing of Expense Reports resulting from individuals using data fields which have no value to [company], but may have processing impacts within the system. At this time, there is no way to remove or 'grey-out' these unused fields. If you have not been trained on the use of a field and/or do not know what the field may/may not do, don't enter any data within that field - ask your branch admin or contact the help desk.
</end transmission>

What a fantastic example of a user experience directly impacting business: useless but open entry fields = garbage data = inaccurate financials!

Let's peak into the inner chambers, to see how this might play out:

CEO> "How are we doing this week for revenue?"

CFO> "No idea. I don't have any numbers to work with."

CEO> "Why not? That's ten weeks in a row!"

COO> "Another financials system crash."

CTO> "Some junior tech in nowheresville accidentally hit the drop select of death again, and now we can't get reports done for that half of the country."

CEO> "The analysts and the board are going to kill me - someone take care of this right now."

COO> "Fix it, or get rid of it!"

CTO> "We can't fix it - we didn't buy the configuration module. And we cut the deployment services contract from 24 weeks to 6 weeks, so there was no time to figure out which fields we needed from the generic installation..."

local tags: enterprise, maxheadroom, ux