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Comment by Dwolb | Hacker News Reader

I really hope you weren't a product manager at Intuit.

>Second, the fact that Quickbooks is so awkward and inconsistent to use isn't a UI problem, it's a feature. This is an important lesson in designing software that people use for their jobs. When you make elegant, intuitive software that almost anyone can use in short order, it stops being an impressive item to put on a resume. And it stops being a barrier to entry for competing professionals.

A good professional product does not have "awkward or inconsistent" UI. It has consistent, useful UI that can expand as user's sophistication grows. i.e. it has a learning curve

The curve for learning an "awkard and inconsistent" UI you highlighted is useless and a detriment to SMB's everywhere. A proper SMB accounting approach would to have standard patterns for doing simple accounting with the ability to grow and extend as sophistication of your org grows.

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I was a dev manager for a team that was working on a Quickbooks-adjacent product. I had a lot of meetings with core Quickbooks teams and met many of their PMs. They are, for the most part, really good at their jobs.

Your comment comes off as incredibly naive. It's the same naivete that I had before seeing the internal perspective and it's what my comment was addressing. There are psychological phenomena in play that make an existing, market dominant piece of software more successful and harder to displace when it's objectively harder to use when that software forms the basis for someone's job.

And it's important to realize this because this is counterintuitive to what those of us that create software for a living have been taught. We're taught to think like you. We're taught to make software that delights our users and is as easy as possible to use. But understanding a specific set of circumstances when that approach is destined to fail can be important.

>There are psychological phenomena in play that make an existing, market dominant piece of software more successful and harder to displace when it's objectively harder to use when that software forms the basis for someone's job.

For the record and from the GP's context, I'm going to assume by 'harder' you mean 'difficult to use UI'.

I'd assert 'difficult to use UI' is the incorrect type of 'hardness' or 'difficulty' that should be present in an enterprise piece of software. Mainly because fighting a UI is non-value add to the goal of the user. The user's goal, in this case is to manage their books.

Because of this tension of QB _purposefully_ being at odds with the user goal, I'd expect start-ups and new software products to gobble up QB market share over time. If this is the case, all QB can do is make it more difficult for current users to switch off them (.QBW file extension?) as their market share slowly dwindles and their channel sellers slowly disappear.

Good 'difficulty' should come from the learning curve it takes to master (i.e. accurately, quickly, and reliably) the task at hand.

FWIW I'd expect purposefully building difficult-to-use products has many negative externalities for the company culture and this would be a big red flag for any future Intuiters.

You're still not getting it. A Bookkeeper's goal isn't to keep the books. That's their product, but they have their own small business that has more fundamental goals. Accounting software that's easy to use makes it easier to keep the books, but it runs counter to that more fundamental goal of running a successful small business. You're right that there are negative externalities. Small business accounting costs more than it needs to and, by extension, small businesses need to charge customers a bit more. But the people deciding which accounting software to use are the ones benefiting from that negative externality, not the ones paying for it. And as a software vendor, you always target decision makers over users or you go out of business.

I don't think anyone is misunderstanding your point, I just think its ridiculously backwards. It's the equivalent of the government breaking roads so they can create jobs fixing those roads. If software can simplify bookkeeping and make the profession obsolete, and you deliberately make your software in a way that keeps that inefficiency at play...you guys are gonna wake up one day and realize you spent all your time serving the bloated middleware instead of the true end user, and your market will evaporate before you know what happened....

We get that from a short term perspective, it may make sense to keep it too complicated for the end users, but efficient markets will prevail short of forced intervention.

If that is how Intuit thinks, I cannot wait for the day when they get displaced.

Yes, it's ridiculously backwards. But it's reality. Intuit, at various times, has tried to make the kinds of changes you guys are suggesting. And every time they've run smack into reality and had to backpedal. Reality is like that...you can try to deny, and fail, or accept it and adjust your thinking. It isn't a how Intuit thinks issue, it's the way their customers think after decades of getting comfortable using Intuit software.

Another example...Intuit has wanted to transition customers away from the desktop version of Quickbooks for many years now. If you think Quickbooks online has it's learning curve, just spend some time using the desktop product. It's a maze that takes years to learn to navigate and many of the "features" are horribly buggy from years of neglect. But pry it from their cold, dead hands Intuit cannot, so you can still buy new versions of Quickbooks Desktop.

That's why what you guys are saying is so ridiculous. You're denying a reality in a field you're not familiar with. You're saying something should be different because it's inefficient or other industries work differently. But you haven't done the user research. You don't have decades of experience dealing with the people who actually spend money on the software. You're in no position to critique the way that Intuit thinks.

I don't think I like anything you are saying but it would be hard to deny that this is pretty interesting insight.

Believe their larger point is that these types of companies get disrupted eventually.

> And every time they've run smack into reality and had to backpedal.

I am all for being brutally aware of reality...but, there is also a time horizon to these things. Most great startups had to break through resistance. Maybe the resistance you guys saw was simply resistance to change...

Maybe tweaks to UI isn't what wins this game...maybe its tools like Pilot or services like bench, or maybe its something like the car solving the horse manure problems of the turn of the century...

And to be fair, there are some studies that show cognitive strain being linked to better focus or something like that (Disclaimer: I have no idea what im talking about, but am pretty sure Thinking Fast and Slow discusses it.) so, maybe a harder UI is better...

What I do know is that I want software to make my life easier and more efficient. And I don't mind if that takes away part of a means of my livelihood, I'll figure out the next step the same way I got to where I am today.

If I understood you correctly, the folks in charge of this are very good at their jobs and I am sure they are optimizing for their quarterly earnings, or bonuses, or whatever else they are incentivized to do...and I get the idea that they see bookkeepers as their customers, not business owners, and are serving them as best they know how... but this feels like the lazy way out of innovating.

Thanks for sharing this story. This is something I suspected and have actually complained to customer support about repeatedly (things are buried within menus of menus, strange link redirects that don't make sense, functionality that is not available to business owner accounts but is available to the supporting accountant-logins!!). These terrible patterns that keep users from more easily managing their books and the awful lobbying of congress to keep taxes complex are why I think people should actively boycott Intuit software.

I agree with you, and have seen other examples:

- government managers are evaluated on budget and headcount because the core services they provide are hard to measure. Thus they don’t want new software to help them be more efficient, unless the alternative is catastrophic, visible failure to provide their service.

- Lawyers charge by the hour. They don’t want new software to dramatically reduce the time spent in discovery. Then they would have to bill for outcomes (cases won) and there are too many things out of their control.

Basically nobody wants to charge for value, because value is hard to quantify accurately and quickly. You wind up showing costs to prove value, so nobody wants to reduce costs.

> government managers are evaluated on budget and headcount because the core services they provide are hard to measure.

That’s... untrue. Government managers are judged (in terms of evaluation of job performance) largely on minimizing both costs and negative public attention.

OTOH, managers generally (and not just in the public sector) like to have big budget and headcount numbers on their résumés as proof of scope of responsibility.

Just a note, not to argue any of your substantial points, but Intuit announced about a year ago that they will no longer develop a desktop version of Quickbooks for Mac (leaving v. 2016 as the last version, officially supported through May 2019). They continue to make a version for Windows.

> If software can simplify bookkeeping and make the profession obsolete

The GP's point isn't that software can simplify bookkeeping but that bookkeeping itself is not simple.

Any company (especially startups) that gets to scale eventually outgrows Quickbooks. You don't see any F500 or any large scale startup ($100M+ in revenue) using QB because it simply isn't built for those type of needs. But there are swaths of bookkeepers who understand how it works and how to migrate their profession to NetSuite/SAP/Intacct/etc.

QB is the bookkeeping equivalent of Excel. It does it's job well and power users benefit massively from it. Pitch and Bench are competitive, but the aren't great fits for someone who will eventually need more professional finance or uses a tax accountant that is more efficient with their tool of choice.

> it's the equivalent of government breaking roads so they can create jobs fixing those roads

Indeed. Perhaps you're familiar with our habit of picking a random country to blow up and then flood with contractors every couple years.

So Hypothetical then:

1) Using QuickBooks I can keep 1 clients books in an hour. I charge the client $100/hr

2) Using a Competitors software I can shave 10 minutes off that.

Assuming I work an 8 hour day, I'd be making $120 more a day if I switched off Quickbooks, minus the time it would take me to learn new software.

Small business fundamental goals indeed.

Unless the labor pool of bookkeepers expands by 30% (increased usability) and prices fall by 30% or more due to increased competition.

Quickbooks isn't slow to use, it's unintuitive. That's a crucial difference to your calculation. An experienced Quickbooks user can still work very quickly by internalizing the wonkiness. The inefficiency is suffered by novice users.

In isolation that sounds fantastic. When looking at the greater market dynamics, it's not at roses. Professionals tend to form opinions in the interest of their self preservation, whether consciously or otherwise.

By shaving off the time it takes to keep the books, a percentage of clients will decide that the time it takes to keep the books isn't worth outsourcing. The shorter you make the time commitment, the more the cost/benefit analysis leans that way.

You've also made it easier for other bookkeepers. Now they have more room in their day for more clients, plus the barrier of entry for new bookkeepers is powered by the easier software. All of a sudden you have negative pricing pressure driving your rates down and next thing you know your client base has gone up but your rates have gone down and you're making the same amount of money but with more client management overhead due to additional clients being serviced.

Then at some point, the ease of use shrinks to the point where a critical mass of the client base have decided to do it themselves, and you start finding it hard to source enough clients to fill all 8 hours a day, and have yet more negative pricing pressure to make up for it. What started as making your job more efficient evolved into making your job so efficient you weren't needed.

Agreed.

In the UK the SMB accounting market is owned by Freeagent and Xero, which are both really easy to use. We used QB for a short period of time. It was a terrible piece of software and we couldn't dump it fast enough. They are still entrenched in the US but I wouldn't expect their so-called competitive advantage of "hard to use" to last.

I agree with this. Good software updates that I've resisted in the past have often surprised me at how much I prefer them once I acclimate to them.

The alternate line of thinking, that nothing big about the UI or system can ever change unless a customer specifically asks for it, seems to conveniently pop up in teams with enormous technical debt that make big changes unthinkable for managers. I'm guessing this is the case for QuickBooks - given the years they've spent supporting an inconsistent system, apparently with a goal of preventing it from becoming consistent, while also inserting customer-requested features.

I have a hunch that if you're afraid of inconveniencing customers by making the software better, then the real problem is that you're afraid users won't stick around, and it's because you think that you haven't taken good enough care of them to weather the bump of re-acclimation. Compare the unchanging-system strategy to Snapchat's. Snapchat regularly improves their software (and users complain about it until they re-acclimate), because they are confident that users will stick around through updates; this confidence comes from the fact that they know they do a good job serving their users. So, my hunch is that when this unchanging-system strategy emerges, it's likely because you've already spent a long time disappointing users and eroding customer confidence.

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