* Don’t underestimate the importance of a good user interface
Quite a few years ago, ergonomics were all the rage, with vendors designing their hardware interfaces so they were ergonomically correct for customers’ comfort. Likewise, management vendors must also focus on user interfaces.
Rapid, easy deployment is one area in particular where this can be applied. Enterprise users typically have highly skilled personnel deploying software. As you move to smaller companies, the levels of technical expertise will vary. Move to consumer products and the level of expertise varies even more. But even a person with a high level of technical expertise may not have previous installation experience with the product and may not know what configuration options to select.
I had some recent experience with this when trying to set up a wireless LAN at home. I unpacked the hardware and began installation. The vendor provided a CD for the installation that walks you through a series of about eight to 10 screens to set up the router and main computer, which I did. The CD also had a facility for saving the configuration procedure to flash memory to configure other systems on the LAN. I followed the instructions but got an error message that said it couldn’t do this function for some mysterious reason that it didn’t elaborate on. So I ended up installing the software on my laptop and responding to the screens with responses that I thought were correct.
Then the moment of truth arrived – to see if the WLAN was up and if my laptop could connect. To make a long story short, no. There was a utility that told me it couldn’t access the link, but there were no diagnostics to let me know what was wrong. Finally, after fiddling with it for quite a while, I decided to go to the vendor’s Web site to look for FAQs or a knowledge base.
What I found was another installation utility. I had nothing to lose since it wasn’t working anyway, so I downloaded and ran it. It auto-discovered what was on my base system, asked me for an SSID and password, and it did the rest. (Remember that the other utility made me go through eight to 10 screens, some of which required multiple responses.) Then it asked if I wanted to save the information to automatically configure other systems on the WLAN. I said yes, and it worked this time. I took the diskette it created and put it in my laptop, and in a matter or minutes, it completed the installation there.
I fired up a Web browser, and everything worked perfectly after spending 15 minutes, tops, on the second attempt with the new installation utility (including downloading the utility and running it on the base computer and the laptop). The first attempt with the CD in the box took hours – including the install, figuring out which options to select, checking and rechecking the options I chose, and troubleshooting. And it still didn’t work.
My question is: Why didn’t the vendor include the new utility with the hardware instead of the not-as-easy-to-use utility that was in the box?
So what are the differences in the user experience between the two utilities? The first one gave me a lot of options. I then had to figure out what the options meant, whether they were relevant or not, and what the appropriate responses should be. The second utility automatically collected the information it needed from my computer and automatically configured the router and software based on that information. It didn’t rely on me to figure out what I had, but I still had the flexibility to go back and manually modify the configuration if needed. The second utility got the job done with minimal effort. This is a perfect example of what I mean when I say that vendors need to develop UIs with a sense of understanding users and how they are likely to interact with the software, much like the approach to ergonomics in the past.
Management vendors can do a lot to build in ease of use, and build out complexity from their UIs. This was one small example of the value of UIs designed with the user interactions in mind. And there are many more.
