Enterprise Sexiness or Please stop ogling my sweet SaaS
UPDATE: I think that Jevon has really nailed some key points. This is my favourite.
When the user is in control
Configurability, personalization and sharing are not considered technologies by most users, they are a base use case for their personal lives. People understand control in a very serious way, and they know when they have it and when they do not.
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A couple of months ago I was taking to Jon Lax at the Toronto Expression Around the Clock event. I told him that I wanted to focus on enterprise user experience design and he looked at me as if I said I wanted to bring haute couture to prison uniforms. It is not that the idea is preposterous it is just something that has always seemed highly unlikely.
In a post today Robert Scoble asks “Any of you have any ideas on how to make business software sexy?”
Many of the Enterprise Irregulars led by Vinnie Mirchandani have blown up and said that sexiness is in the eye of the beholder. Don’t Weep for Underappreciated Enterprise Software by Dan Farber on ZDnet is a good launching post to see what people are saying.
Michael Krigsman wrote that Robert misses the point:
When I’m at home using Twitter, a great example of cool consumer software, I want to be delighted, thrilled, entertained, and engaged. When I transfer money through my bank, which is certainly a non-sexy enterprise system, I demand the system work every time without fail. There’s a big difference between enterprise and consumer systems, a lesson I suspect Robert Scoble is about to learn.
Nick Carr counters Michael’s argument:
By perpetuating a false dichotomy between the friendliness of consumer apps and the seriousness of business apps, all that Krigsman is doing is giving enterprise vendors cover for continuing to produce software that’s difficult and unpleasant to use. Scoble’s asking the right question.
This is where the whole debate forks from what Scoble was taking about. Michael Krigsman goes on to rip on Nick Carr: Carr talks about applications being friendly and Krigsman thinks that means easy to use. This exposes what I think is a common misconception that a good experience is more than ease of use — people need to be engaged.
There are many examples of applications that are useful, dependable, interesting, very slick, but not many enterprise applications that are engaging. I think that the aspect of sexiness that is missing from enterprise applications is JOY. John Morkes of Expero Inc. at the closing keynote of CanUX 2006 talked about the Joy of Use (PPT). In this presentation there is an example of how Quicken was trying to make their signature application more enjoyable. This was well before the idea of enterprise2.0 and consumer experiences on the enterprise. Companies are aware that their products need to be friendly and that it means more than easy to use.
It reminds me of when I present interface mockups to corporate clients: they often have more than one colour in them. There is always someone who feels that they are too bright or flashy for their organization. The corporate aesthetic that prefers monochrome designs comes out of a time when 4-colour printing was too expensive for internal communications. So decades of blue on white drab has become the norm, making people feel uncomfortable with bright colours that they associate with the marketing of consumer products.
I’m afraid that consumer experiences on the enterprise will not be as revolutionary as we all hope but a slower evolution.
I hope to talk more about this in the future and it reminds me that we have not had an EnterpriseCamp in Toronto for quite some time.
I needed to add this list by Anshu Sharma. It is a pretty amusing idea, like there is a Victoria’s Secret catalogue for CIOs out there where you can ogle some sweet SaaS:
Here are five things that turn CIO’s on:
- VIRTUALIZATION: A data center that has fewer wires, requires less energy and is easier to manage is nothing short of an IT dream.
- SaaS: Ability to rapidly deploy new functionality without having to buy new hardware and go through lengthy implementation cycles – its sexy the way a husband cooking dinner is sexy way for a wife. Again, it takes a certain eye and maturity.
- VISIBILITY: Call it Business Intelligence, Business Activity Monitoring or Complex Event Processing, the ability to have both senior executives and employees performing the actual tasks be able to get actionable intelligence is huge.
- COLLABORATION: I recently attended a Cisco telepresence session and I don’t care who you are and what you smoke, that stuff is outright sexy. And so is Oracle’s Social CRM.
- TRANSACTIONS: Yes, age-old transactional applications. When they just work, its sexy. The way a plain perfect old black dress just works.
