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Fully agree. And we all know beautiful but totally broken UIs and UX, and "ugly" but extremely functional UIs and UXs, that actually make them beautiful

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And UIs that are neither beautiful nor function (looking at you Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, and many other "Enterprise" applications).

If any of these were functional, most users wouldn't care about the visual appeal. NN were correct, but apparently their message didn't reach that particular sphere of web application developers.

If an 'Enterprise' applications website were functional people would be able to navigate to assistance when using the app. Therefore costing money in competent support techs or improving the product itself, neither of which are as easy as just being anti-competitive and monopolistic

I was referring to the web applications themselves, rather than the marketing, documentation, or support websites. In large vendors, those tend to come from a different part of the organisation, so are often superior to the products themselves.

The productivity drain of a poor UI is largely felt by the customers' employees, while the vendor benefits from sales of professional services and premium support contracts.

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