Thomas OtterIn my job I get to see a lot of enterprise applications. From all sorts of vendors. At least 95% of them suffer from what I call the donut syndrome.
(from the cc flickrstream of tinymeme. thankyou)
They have all sorts of funky controls around the edges of the screen, but middle bit, where you actually enter the data is still locked in the table, column, row model. Navigation may have improved, but actually entering stuff hasn’t really moved on much since, well, the invention of the relational database.
This, on the other hand demands to be used. hattip to the Signals and Noise blog, one of my regular reads.
Category: UI software industry usability Tags: GUI, users
8 responses so far ↓
1 BenBoeser November 26, 2008 at 6:46 am
You are right. It would be great to make business apps in a way that users like to “play” with them.
On the other hand you have to keep in mind that some (not too few) of the end users who sit in the departments of big enterprises would be completely overwhelmed by such a UI. They need their plain tables with a clear structure. And they see it as their personal value that they can interpretate the design flaws / UI pains and know what they have to click in order to achieve their tasks.
And the vendors make a lot of money to teach them how to do so.
Always ups and downs to it.
Good comparison though
2 Thomas Otter November 26, 2008 at 7:16 am
Ben,
Yes, some business applications need to be all about end users sitting in departments, but more and more business applications should be about occasional and what I’m calling volunteer users.
If “enterprise” apps don’t offer these users a compelling experience, they will simply not use them. After all, how often do you willingly log on to your performance appraisal application?
3 Syris November 29, 2008 at 6:26 pm
You make a good point Thomas. Why even log into my performance appraisal application at all? I mean sure there are times when I need to have the entire toolset at my disposal for certain things (namely analytics and reporting) but it sure would be nice to be able to fire off “volunteer” data (status messages, approvals, profile updates) via other avenues like Twitter, Facebook, Outlook, etc.
4 Visualization and HR data. July 2, 2009 at 2:39 am
[...] of table and text. I while ago about blogged about many enterprise software UIs being like Donuts. Via Steve Clayton this arrived in my feedreader this morning. It is goodness. Someone give this [...]
5 Visualization and HR data. « Vendorprisey July 2, 2009 at 2:56 am
[...] of table and text. I while ago about blogged about many enterprise software UIs being like Donuts. Via Steve Clayton this arrived in my feedreader this morning. It is goodness. Someone give this [...]
6 On user interfaces, the iPad and Charles Dickens. January 28, 2010 at 5:20 am
[...] enterprise applications are bound by keyboard centric design thinking, basically what I call navigation donuts. Almost every enterprise application I see is trapped in the amber of the table layouts that [...]
7 On user interfaces, the iPad and Charles Dickens. « Vendorprisey January 28, 2010 at 5:26 am
[...] enterprise applications are bound by keyboard centric design thinking, basically what I call navigation donuts. Almost every enterprise application I see is trapped in the amber of the table layouts that [...]
8 On user interfaces, the iPad and Charles Dickens. January 28, 2010 at 11:02 am
[...] Most enterprise applications are bound by keyboard centric design thinking, basically what I call navigation donuts. Almost every enterprise application I see is trapped in the amber of the table layouts that [...]