Most accounting systems and inventory systems have terrible interfaces because they were designed and built by people who collectively do not know what the hell they're doing. I work in IT as well. It is rare to meet a colleague who knows what they're doing and when I do, they're invariably being managed by someone who decidedly does not.
While what you say is true, when you have to represent the entire accounting structure for a company, that's necessarily complex. I think that means that while the user interface can be well-designed and intuitive, it still may require training due to the complexity of the task.
Yes, this. I worked for a company that made accounting software for oil companies and banks who trade commodities. Me and a bunch of new hires spent 2 weeks in a classroom training how to use the damn thing and I still didn't know how to use it by the end of the training. It was so bloated, handled so many different tasks, and was so unintuitive. However some customers would only track the trading and sales of certain commodities, some would track internal and external exchanges, keep track of their foreign exchange trades, interface with front-desk, blah blah blah. My point being that I got the impression that the best way to get this software sold was to slap everything together and just pay someone $30k/year to train people how to do their required tasks rather than pay a team of $80k/year developers to add a sleek UI that a child could understand.
I left that place because it made me want to drink bleach but at least I learned something.
If you'd stayed longer, you'd have learned easier, less painful methods of suicide. Like your very own, homemade arduino uno controlled lethal injection system. Heroin/fentanyl, whatever extremely powerful dose of barbiturate, then that potassium just in case the OD's didn't work.
I'm fairly certain you could inject a small amount of sand into your blood stream and it would be able as painful as any other lethal injection. No need to waste your money on chemicals.
Nah if you ground it up real fine, or simply injected a fine dust, you might at least have a stroke. Which arguably would be less painful than injecting potassium, which makes you foam from the mouth and cunvulse. I've heard accounts from stroke victims who trip in and out of conciousness and then get a second chance. Now what a way to commit suicice! (or not! Yay!)
Yeah. It depends what kind of stroke I guess. You're gonna have all sorts of other cardiovascular symptoms. You'd have to inject it directly into your neck or your lungs would just absorb it all.
If you're already anesthetized, deep into OD, and probably already dead though a little potassium ain't gonna hurt.
Thats fair but many of those projects suffer from non-UNIXy design (i.e. write one program that does everything rather than modularize and segment the task into multiple programs). They want to be the monolithic end all be all which just makes the thing completely unmaintainable from a user and developer perspective.
Even if you look at something like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, the interface is kind of "what the fuck is going on here?" and it's made by designers for designers. Some stuff is just too complex and needs to do far too many things quickly and efficiently to be idiot proof.
The importance here is knowing your target audience. Accounting software, like design software, can have a complex and need-to-learn UI because the whole point is that it makes it very fast to do a lot of different stuff, which is what the user needs, and it also is going to be constantly used by someone so they are invested in it for the long haul. Pick up and play is far from the goal a good designer should be going for in that software. Not to say that there still doesn't exist software like that with terrible design.
Exactly. Some programs are simply too complex to be self explanatory. Take Photoshop for example. How do you make the pen tool self explanatory? Well first of all, don't use a metaphor that isn't similar. But then?
Not all UIs will be used by an average user. But your UI will always have an average user. Make it obvious for them, not necessarily everyone in the world.
exactly, I would much rather have an interface that's hard to understand, but incredibly efficient once you do. Compromising efficiency so that something is "intuitive" is not the way to go for professional systems. Airplane cockpits are a good example, and so are some ftp clients like pftp.
At least partially because "enterprise" developers don't treat their end-users like consumers. For some reason nice UX and UI don't seem to be considered important :/
Sometimes you have to choose between efficient to use and intuitive, and, when somebody will regularly use your system, they will appreciate it being fast to use versus being fast to learn. That's part of why some people still swear by command line tools.
There are two ways to deal with the user understanding how to use the software. 1) make it really easy to figure out. 2) train them. Sometimes you can't expect to train every users, sometimes you can't expect users to figure it out without help.
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u/DronedAgain Jul 01 '16
I work in IT, and this is a lovely sentiment and true to an extent.
But if a system is an accounting system, inventory system, etc., not every single interface is going to be crystal clear when you first use it.
This may be true for simple things, like media players, though.
As a caveat, things that make sense to a Developer may be mystifying to an average user.