Today, I posted an interview I did with Doug McCune on InfoQ.com. His personality and passion for development came through in his encouragement for developers to build “cool shit.” I love the sentiment, as I so often get trapped in trying to bring business value and forget that sometimes software development should just be a creative endeavor. However, as cool as that sounds, it can be challenging to bring that sort of mindset into the enterprise. With that in mind, Doug had some really interesting comments on UX within business applications:

Enterprise software is almost uniformly horrible, but there’s no reason for that. We’re seeing a “UX revolution” in RIA design, and for all the buzzword nonsense surrounding “user experience, ” there’s something real happening in terms of the overall quality of the experience delivered by RIAs. We’ve seen some really great and innovative work in consumer RIAs, with a trend toward simple and intuitive interfaces. And yet in enterprise software this trend has barely even begun, it’s all still complex. I want to see enterprise applications treated like consumer apps, with the same attention to the user experience and with a consistent drive to simplify and make everything more intuitive. Complex systems don’t have to be presented with confusing software. But it takes more work to figure out the simple, elegant solution. It’s far cheaper and faster to make bad complex software than good simple software.

I also think there’s a business intelligence breakthrough afoot that will bring these same concepts of intuitive software specifically to the BI arena. Business intelligence is just a fancy way of saying that you’re extracting value from raw data in some way. This is typically limited to your mundane set of charts, gauges, and all the other normal dashboard UI elements that are the current standard. But I think thinking about BI problems from a fresh perspective, from the perspective of someone outside the enterprise space, will lead to the invention of new visualization methods. Maybe sales performance isn’t something best shown using a silly looking speedometer gauge. Maybe there’s an intuitive way to extract more value from that heap of raw data sitting on enterprise servers. But I don’t think enterprise developers have been willing enough to experiment with new concepts. People need to start inventing.

I have to agree that enterprise software is generally poor, particularly in the user interfaces.  In addition, his comments on working toward the simple, elegant solution makes me want to scream, “Yes!”  I think the only place I differ with him on is where the blame belongs for the overall low quality of enterprise systems.  Developers do deserve some of the blame, but I think generally the challenges come from the organizations, project owners, and managers who do not understand what is now possible, or even worse never understood how to build software to begin with.

In years gone by, the platforms really limited the ability of developers to build cool user interfaces that still made sense on the budget.  I was originally drawn to Flex because it can do things that simply weren’t possible on the web only a few short years ago.  This probably factors into the decisions that even smart, experienced managers are still making today, as many of them have previous attempts at doing cool things that led to ballooned budgets and jeopardized projects.

So, there is the obvious onus on developers to sell their ideas and educate their organizations on what is possible now that the platforms have capabilities way beyond getting data in and out of the database.  However, with that said, the real limitation of enterprise software will always be that the teams building most systems are part of companies that do not exist to build software, and often just don’t understand the processes, the platforms, the code, the users, etc.  In those cases, it is unlikely that they will be able to overcome their limitations to build cool, highly usable systems.  So, while I am optimistic that the advances that have come with the RIA revolution will trickle into the enterprise, it is unlikely that they will have the same impact on business applications as we are seeing in consumer applications built by companies that exist solely to build quality software.

If you enjoyed Doug in writing, check him out in this recent Flasher Magazine video interview. Also, look for him in a future DrunkOnSoftware.com interview.