Comments on: The Hidden UX We Miss

By: Gary Barber

Gary Barber — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:09:20 +0000

@dean that’s where you need to call in the famous UX consultant to weave their magic and solve all the worlds problems before 11:00.

Seriously the use of externals often plugs the gap. Sadly budget and some IT manager egos tend to stop this process.

By: Dean Groom

Dean Groom — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:53:14 +0000

The problem for IT (I head the dept) is that everyone who should be involved are too ‘busy’ to get involved, but more than happy to comment after. The people who need to be involved are all too often happy to watch it sail south to IT, at least they dont have to do MORE work, and then they can moan about it later … the IT folk are not suprised by this, it’s par for the course!

By: Ben Winter-Giles

Ben Winter-Giles — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 03:42:04 +0000

Thanks Gary,
UX. always a hard pill for the accountants to swallow.

I once did a very quick survey about how long it took an organisation to publish an ‘average’ web page, and to make an ‘average’ web page change / update. (surveyed across a wide selection of web authors I might add, to provide a nice supportive average)

And then I took to them a prototype which we used to measure the time taken to complete the same tasks.

Now barring the foibles of the prototype at the time, we were able to demonstrate a significant time saving.

That said, they still went with a ‘low investment’ tune of the administrative area, because the benefits gained simply were still not in the favour of investing more on the admin side.

They did however invest more heavily in the client side, which I guess was a decent-ish trade off.

Sadly, unless the developers take the intitive to invest in the administrative sides of sites, then Business are not likely to take any heed of our pain (as authors and what not).

But like many things in other industries (automotive, manufacturing, building construction), as time passes, and globally our ability to easily and repeatedly deliver improved background tools, we shall start to see better and better admin sides.

They still try to make better hammers, despite they all do much the same thing.

By: Ben Buchanan

Ben Buchanan — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 02:02:38 +0000

I think a lot of this problem is that the cost of a bad intranet is a bit of a hidden cost.

How do you quantify the amount of money lost because someone struggled with the interface? How do you prove that the fault is with the system and not the user? How do you prove that better UX would lead to bottom-line cost savings?

It’s made harder by the fact that, due to their very nature, companies with good intranets can’t/don’t show them off! I’ve seen many articles written about top intranets, but they’re pretty useless articles most of the time since you can’t see what you’re talking about.

Companies also cling to the idea that they can simply mandate “use the intranet!” as if staff can’t find a way around them.

Can’t use the arcane calendar system? Switch everyone to Google Calendar or some hosted groupware solution. Can’t share documents through the impenetrable document sharing bohemoth? Screw it, use Pownce.

The mob is very definitely stronger and faster than the organisation it works for.