RE: 'Intuitive' software applications

Subject: RE: 'Intuitive' software applications
From: "David Locke" <dlocke -at- ll -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2004 11:45:02 -0500


Intuitive interfaces are critical. They are hard to do, because the
audience/user base/market changes constantly.

The reason intuitive interfaces are critical has to do with the way
accounting looks at reading. Reading is a cost. When the Total Cost of
Ownership (TCO) was devised, Gartner looked at negative use costs, but found
that they were off the books. There was no accounting basis for including
the cost of reading a manual. There was an accounting basis for classroom
training and the cost of the technical support call. There was no accounting
basis for desktop training or the time spent on the technical support call.
So company politics reflects this accounting bias. Training is a profit
center. Doc is a cost center.

>From the customer's perspective doc is a negative use cost, aka waste. I
know. They learned. They climbed the knowledge hill, but that is invisible
to the cost accountants running the world. An intuitive interface reduces
the cost of reading. But, again, if you look at it from the perspective of
cost accounts, the improvement is invisible.

What is not invisible is the gut-level feeling CIOs and other executives
have about the cost of software and the lie that most software-related ROI
projections have become. It hasn't helped that Gartner created another
concept called the Time To Return (TTR), a simple calculation that is mostly
wrong.

Fix the UI. Write real minimalist documentation. Save the customer money and
we might save the industry, unlikely though.

David Locke



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Follow-Ups:

References:
Re: 'Intuitive' software applications: From: Dick Margulis

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