Click here if you don’t see the screen.

Watching it is 20 minutes well spent, even if you aren’t a big spaghetti sauce fan. This isn’t a food blog.  Gladwell’s message is very important for those that design and deploy software, especially those responsible for the user experience.

Most of what he says about spaghetti sauce could be applied to user experience. There is no perfect sauce, there is no perfect UI or UX. Embrace diversity. 

It is one of the finest collection of vintage and significant cars as you will find anywhere, other than at the other Benz  museum in Stuttgart. It is my sad affliction to think about software design at the weekends, and the Benz museum provided some ideas on usability.

This is an early French  racing car. a 1921 Amilcar. 28 horsepower, 908cc motor.

This is the steering wheel of a formula one  championship  winning car. Comment below if you can tell me whose.

It would overwhelm most of us, but for the best drivers in the world, every switch is vital and a lot of thought went into its layout. It is a User interface built for one.

The problem with a lot of business application software is that it has as many buttons and switches as the example above, but most users would be better of with the Amilcar layout. Most users just want to get in and drive. It is only when you really get to know your user that you can actually design something that works for them.

I originally posted this on my personal blog, but then Matthias Zeller from Adobe twittered:

Wish I had the race car steering wheel. business apps feel more like Boeing 747 cockpits

from the telstar logisitics cc flickrstream. He has a great set of aircraft pictures.

Yes.

He then commented in more detail on the blog.

When we are talking about the Adobe Genesis project we use similar analogies. Business Applications are like Boeing 747 cockpits. However as a regular knowledge worker I just need access to a small subset of the functionality. What if you could grab the altimeter or ground speed indicator out of the cockpit and build your own custom cockpit. But you might want to create multiple of those (we call them workspace) based on project or specific context. Even better what if the business application based on your specific context can suggest a custom workspace for you which you can further customize, save and share with others.

Oh, yes and I like the pictures. Next time I visit SAP I need to stop by the museum.

For those delivering enterprise apps, understanding and using the newer technologies is important. They have the potential to make the UI more compelling and more pleasant to use. Design becomes ever more paramount. This is something that my colleague Ray Valdes stresses in his upcoming RIA/AJAX marketscope.

I recently published a case study on how Ness used a tool called Worklight to radically simply ERP time entry. (summary here, you need access for the full report.) Do you have other examples where you have radically simplified user experience? I plan to do more work on UI simplification in 2009.