One of the things I got from this was that maybe we should do more to design structured interfaces instead of counting the number of clicks needed to transition to the page you're looking for.
Many enterprise applications (especially web based ones) are horrible to navigate, and some people spend most of their working days in them. It's terrible.
The app was modal and took up the entire screen. Except is was clear that the developers had larger displays than the workers because in order to view and use the entire page the workers had to scroll around both X and Y using the scroll bars. Well, that and the fact that tabbing around didn't go around in a logical order.
I walked out and returned with a slightly LCD display that I bought in a local big box store and nearly started a riot. They had all been using that crappy app for years like that and the worst pain point for it was due to the fact that the devs had assumed that everyone in the company had the same size displays while their employer had refused to buy those larger displays for the 45 people that had to use it.
One of our meetings probably cost ten times the cost of 200 monitors!
Back of the envelope:
$400 * 200 = $80000 for the monitors.
You need to have $80000 / ($100000/12/21/8) = 1600 person/hour of meeting time to equal the cost. 100 people can meet for two days!
I feel like something is off with that calculation, but I cannot find it...
I remember seeing the bill for breakfast for one set of meetings - was nearly $5000.
Yeah - I was off with the "ten times"... but not by a huge amount ;-)
To get around this load time restriction the developer simply put less information and features into window. So rather than spending 10 seconds loading one large form and fill it out, users would have to click though X number of windows, filling out part of the form in window.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but your comment reminded me of this case.
'look at what the iphone does with just one button' is a useless thing to say in an enterprise app.
etc.
it just shows that enterprise app developers don't use the software they make.
The power users know all the special shortcuts. Keyboard mappings, tab order, and also app-specific shortcuts (forcing look-ups to behave certain ways, quick key combos to access forms, etc). They value speed of data entry above almost everything.
The casual users know none of these things, don't care, won't remember them if we try to teach them, and place a much higher value on easy navigation and discovery via visual cues and mouse.
All app developers should be required to sit and watch an expert user interact with a mainframe interface for at least 30 minutes before they're allowed to make arch decisions.
A very good touchscreen interface would probably be as good or better for cases in which typing isn't required, except that most touchscreen interfaces are terrible (janky, frequent missed presses, laggy enough that it's often unclear whether a press has been missed or it's just being slow, confusing navigation—see those new McDonalds ordering kiosks for all of the above) so that doesn't seem to be a realistic option unless you put some kind of UX dictator with great taste in charge of the project.
A commercial came on the TV in the waiting room for SAP, and this lady started cursing about what a piece of trash it was. I was really shocked. She was not someone I expected to even know what SAP was, but I guess she was an unfortunate user stuck with having to use it in an office somewhere.