As far as I can tell, the number one rule of being a UX or UI specialist is that one must never, under any circumstances, actually talk with a U, nor consult the team whose job it is to assist U's with the X the designers and developers swear up and down is so intuitive it should never require explanation.
Most applications are still horrible and unintuitive to the people expected to use them, especially when they're built for niche users. This is the normal experience of using software as a non-developer.
Almost every company has customer support people who are beating their heads against their desks trying desperately to surface this feedback in a way that anyone in the company will care about, but support agents "aren't technical," so the developers don't think they could possibly have anything useful to say about their work.
It's a vicious circle. It doesn't have to be this way. But I'm all put of ideas about how to change it.
Instead of stand-ups let developers spend 15 minutes each day in a call with a customer who has a problem or feature request.
Extreme Programming got that part covered much better.
My experience in startups has been that improvements or bug fixes are often ignored in favor of projects that have some long-shot possibility of increasing revenue, even if the existing customers threaten to and do leave over the bugs and hate the new features.
At least occasionally look at how actual users are using software?
In case of paying for software system I would require it as part of a contract.
If I would be decision maker on software project I would also demand it.
"We notice you're all still using the old UI and talking about how bad the new UI is when it's actually great! You don't need those features that aren't accessible from the new UI anyway. We're going to default everyone to the new UI now and you'll have to manually change the setting back if you want to."
"Ok you're all still using the old UI, even though the new UI is obviously better, so we're going to turn off the old UI at the end of the month"
"Oooooops! A bunch of people said they'd stop paying us if we turned off the old UI so we will now keep the old UI on until the end of the year"
"The Old UI is gone now. Where did all our customers go?"
In my personal experience, this only happens after the development. We have found no way to obtain useful feedback during the design phase.
Exactly as I said, it's already too late. For it to be most effective, such advice must arrive before I start coding.
Probably the solution is to have the developers get as deep an insight as possible into the problem area they are trying to solve, and work very closely with users at every stage.
Some even expect magical abilities from software to turn bad user data in correct data without any work by U. Address data comes to my mind.
Or I want to see all data at once but why does it take so long and doesn't fit on one page and is incomprehensible?
Ever used any Microsoft product recently ? Or the new xsnow which has a config screen when it starts ? Or Google with warning messages occupying half the screen ?
This is the trend since about 15 years.
Literally more windows 7 would be an upgrade over windows 11.
Whatever stuff they have going on in the background is not worth the anti-user crap.
The system in question is electronic health records (EHR). These are vast systems, really the comparison is "SAP for medical records" as they typically handle scheduling, billing, coding, store reports, notes, results (blood tests, as the tip of the ice berg). The tie ins to other systems are complex. And all of it is critical, as in patient injury or death if sole things go wrong. And much of it can fall under various federal laws, HIPAA is just the start.
These are long lived systems, upgraded over time. Replacing one can be a multi year effort for even a small organization. So replacing one isn't done because a new shiny one exists. New entries face a long battle into the industry, and the needs of a family physician are very different from a hospital or large group of hospitals.
If you want an idea of the scale and scope, the NYC Health and Hospitals project for their Epic EHR ran $1 billion over budget. Might have been more that that.
Journal systems "is a thing" with lots of hairy issues such as integrations between different hospitals and primary care givers, privacy issues etc.
These are not really solved yet, (even on a regional basis) and on top of this comes the probably most important thing, UX for the actual users such as doctors and nurses.
The people selling this software and buying this software are ultimately not the people that use it. In developers minds and according to their spec sheets, the sofware might actually be amazing and flawless.