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.

I often have to enter the conference code twice. Maybe there’s a disconnect between my eyes, my brain and my fingers. Maybe I can no longer use the numeric keypad on a phone without looking at it as I dial (and having to look back and forth at the computer screen for the dialing code) because I spend so much time using numeric keypads on computer keyboards, on which the numbers are organized differently…

Whatever the reason, I implore you, dear conference call organizers, to make one simple change in your routine that will make life just a tiny bit easier for participants like me.

Break the conference code into chunks.

Instead of writing 8137555649, write 813 755 5649 in the meeting invitation.*

It’s well understood in cognitive psychology that chunking helps short-term memory and long-term retention, so chunked conference call codes are both easier to dial and easier to memorize.

Now I just need to come up with a killer tip for stopping conference calls efficiently.

1. * If you prefer to use dashes or periods, go ahead. Numbers like 813-755-5649 or 813.755.5649 are just as easy to dial, though some people might confuse them for phone numbers.

That makes a lot of sense because it you can only send messages to people who want to hear from you. You can’t spam people by direct message.

It becomes a problem, however, if you’re trying to respond privately to customers who don’t follow you. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Twitter’s help bar is wrong.

Here’s an example. I tried to send a direct message from a Twitter account I maintain at work to my personal account and received this error message:

Here’s the problem. If you send follow gturpin to Twitter, you start following @gturpin, not the other way around. It doesn’t send a message to @gturpin requesting to follow you.* Click to see the image at full size.

It doesn’t allow you to send a direct message. It gives you the wrong information and leads you to believe that you’re doing the right thing.

That’s broken.

Usability fail, Twitter.

1. * That would get ugly in a hurry.

In cased you missed it, here’s Seth’s list of 7 kinds of broken:

1. Not my job
2. Selfish jerks
3. The world changed
4. I didn’t know
5. I’m not a fish
6. Contradictions
7. Broken on purpose

Think about the impact that broken things have on your reputation.

Paul Sherman tells CIOs and directors of IT:

Your technology selection processes are incomplete. You’re not assessing the usability of the technology you buy. You’re not only incurring huge hidden costs because of this failure to assess usability, you’re letting enterprise technology vendors get away with building products with poor usability.

The first post highlights the importance of user experience in the success of enterprise software implementations, and provides case studies to back up the claim. Part two offers a framework that can help enterprises better assess the usability and appropriateness of enterprise applications.

Read them here:

• The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters
• The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters, Part 2: Strategic User Experience

P.S. Bonus points to Paul for the statement “Featuritis is a pernicious malady.”

Journalists look for facts they can use in their stories. Journalists are not gullible. Journalists dislike PDF just as much as other users do. These are some of the (hopefully obvious) observations in Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox post about press area usability on corporate web sites, in which he provides highlights of a big, expensive report.

The sample size is too small for the findings to be statistically significant, but the findings look strongly directional and, while there aren’t any earth-shaking observations in the post, Nielsen does raise a good question. Why spend time and money trying to pitch journalists when you neglect simple steps to satisfy journalists who visit your web site?

He quotes one journalist:

“It behooves the company to make their web site easier to use. You immediately begin to hate the company when it’s not.”

One item of note is that most journalists surveyed started by searching an outside service like Google* or Lexis-Nexis before visiting a company’s web site.

Top five objectives when journalists visit a company’s web site?

• Locate a PR contact (name and telephone number)
• Find basic facts about the company (spelling of an executive’s name, his/her age, headquarters location, and so on)
• Discern the company’s spin on events
• Check financial information
• Download images to use as illustrations in stories

1. * Because journalists like Google, right? And holograms. And free food.