User interface friction

Let’s face it: Business systems suck.

I used to wonder why so many business systems are poorly designed. Then I realized that the people who buy business systems based on demos and sales meetings* are never the people who use the systems. They don’t give a damn if the interface makes you want to stab your eye out with a Sharpie.

But they should. As analyst Andreas Pfeifer wrote a few years ago in his User Interface Friction Research, “User interface friction can result in significant productivity loss when it occurs on frequently repeated operations.” Business systems are all about repeated operations, but friction results from amateurish screen design, interface ambiguity, option overload, byzantine or inflexible workflow as well as a lot of other crap that gets in the way of getting the job done.

Andreas’s research compared Mac OS X and Windows XP, but user interface friction isn’t limited to platform issues. Any interface creates friction when it makes it hard to use the tool, which is why many business systems puzzle me. How can they improve productivity when they’re so hard to use? They do, compared to the processes they supplanted, but the question that remains is why they haven’t progressed. My hunch is that expectations are low and few decision-makers see the correlation between usability and productivity.

“Ease of use and elegant, intuitive user interfaces have become as essential as good manufacturing to make a product a success,” Andreas writes. The iPhone raised the bar for cell phone interfaces. It remains to be seen how things are going to play out for the iPad, and I’m curious to see if advances in consumer technology will change expectations for business systems. I hope they do.

Meanwhile, I’m going to be swearing at SharePoint.

1. * Or, stereotypically, hookers and steak dinners, but I think holiday cookie baskets are more common. [↩]