One of the amazing oddities of the travel sector is the lack of adoption by traditional travel agents of modern user interfaces in travel reservation systems. It’s kind of funny that much of the software industry is debating HMTL5 versus Flash while the travel industry is holding onto a user experience that makes me reminiscent of working on a DEC VAX. Even at this week’s Travel Technology Europe 2010 show, I was flabbergasted to see new releases of software purposefully replicating the mainframe-style, hot-key oriented user interface that Global Distribution Systems (GDS) and Central Reservation Systems (CRS) introduced 30 or more years ago.

I struggle to understand the psychology of travel agents who cling to the old-style interfaces. Time and again I’ve read and heard of stories where they claimed that it makes them more efficient and that even new travel agents, many of which grew up using computers and the Internet, abandon the modern enterprise software GUI interfaces (a relative term since the GUI hasn’t changed dramatically in the past 20 years) to adopt a user experience which is one step removed from punch cards and stone tablets. At Travel Technology Europe I spoke to someone from one of the leading TMCs who used to be in operations and spoke enthusiastically and nostalgically about using the old-style interface indicating that she felt it gave her a sense of irreplaceability since it takes a while to understand the idiosyncrasies and nuances of the system to develop the speed that she was so proud of.

So I had a thought while participating in a discussion around the iPad: could touch be the technology that takes travel agent desktops out of the stone age?

Some of what I’ve heard is that as great as the different RIA (Rich Internet Application) technologies may be, it takes a long time to execute different searches and drill down into details. Touch should be faster than manipulating a mouse and if a layered “Minority Report” style UI brought up different search results using a cover-flow approach and you could tap on a property or flight and “flip the card” to see more details and to view photos it could match and potentially exceed current productivity levels and prepare the industry for further innovations.

Just a thought. What’s your take?

In an earlier post I started to talk about the intrinsic value of usability for software products — the satisfaction and value that customers perceive about the product they bought and how it might map to and made the statement that usability should be viewed as important as any other aspect of the product development lifecycle and gave a few statistics to begin the support of my argument.  Now I want to delve into some specific examples of how excellent software usability principles can provide significant positive impact to achieving a company’s business objectives:

How Usability Impacts a Software Company’s Costs

• Reduced Engineering Costs: From a software company’s perspective this is the first, and often only consideration on usability.  The statistics are there to show that the majority of defects and re-work costs — up to 80% — come from omissions and mis-interpretations of requirements and related errors in design. To mitigate the disconnect, many companies have utilized visualization tools like iRise to help translate the intent of product managers and clarify requirements to software development teams, vastly reducing the number of defects that are injected into the code, which result in more re-work, development and test cycles.  This is especially useful in geographically distributed development organizations where communication and collaboration can be a challenge.  However, visualization is not the same as usability engineering.  It’s merely creates a representation of how one person believes the user interface should look like but does nothing to remove design or navigation flaws which w0uld still need to be fixed later on.  But usability engineering + visualization can make a real impact on the performance of the R&D organization.
• Fewer Support Incidents: For every problem that poor usability creates, resources have to be expended to resolve it and soothe the feelings of the customer and make them feel happy again with their purchase.  Now most companies put a lot of effort into coming up with ways to reduce their cost of delivering support services, using FAQs, self-service options and community-driven support.  But that addresses the symptoms, not the cause. The real, sustainable way to reduce support costs is to reduce the number of incoming service incidents.  Improving the usability of the product, making it easy to find, access and use features can go a long way in achieving that goal.

How Usability Positively Reinforces Your Customer Decision to Purchase

• Faster User Adoption, Improved User Productivity and Lower Training Costs: When companies buy software products they buy the promise that they’ll be able to do great things.  All the demos they’ve seen make it look easy to use.  Especially with enterprise software, they’re promised that their employees will be more efficient and their business will run more smoothly and profitably as a result.  But we know from our own experiences that when the vendor leaves, the implementation rarely looks like the demo.  Sometimes it’s because features aren’t turned on or configured properly, but more often than not it’s because the new software operates differently than the way employees have been performing the business process/task at hand.  There can be a significant learning curve, or worse a requirement that the customer changes their business process to fit the software rather than adapt the software to the process.  And the problem is often that there is a general lack of intuitiveness of how to use the product.  I look at my 5 year-old daughter when she uses my wife’s iPhone.  She picks it up and starts using it.  No training, no pouring through a user guide (although she can read at almost a second grade level…yes I’m a proud papa).  Menu-based navigation often leads users struggling to figure out where a certain function is hidden and almost often lacks contextual guides which automatically puts the next or adjacent activities within easy reach.  If more research and care was put into how users work, training budgets would be slashed dramatically, employees would move up the productivity curve faster, and companies would be able extract the value they thought they purchased more rapidly.
• Advocacy and Loyalty.  Building off the last point, happy customers happily, and often without prompting advocate for products that they enjoy using.  Look at how passionate Mac/iPhone owners are about their products.  Even when they bemoan AT&T, iPhone owners still proclaim the greatness of the device itself.  So in a world where people buy products increasingly based on peer recommendations and social platforms like Twitter give a voice to happy customers and connect them easily with prospective buyers.  They are your best and cheapest advertising.  Moreover, happy customers are fiercely loyal and have a selling cost of close to zero.  And in today’s software industry, where maintenance revenues are 4x new license sales, client retention is KPI #1.

Do you think your company invest enough in usability?  If you’re a product manager, how much of your budget and effort do you allocate to this topic?  Let me know.

Maybe it’s because I’m not a true gearhead, but for all the talk about new architectures and business models (which I myself engage in and am excited about) the usability often gets shuttered to the sidelines when talking about enterprise software.  And for the life of me I can’t figure out why.  You can argue (and I will) that a usability should get at least as much attention as the QA function, but in reality, most R&D organizations spend orders of magnitude more on testing than usability.

Let’s start with a few statistics around usability:

• Usability engineering has demonstrated reductions in the product-development cycle by over 33-50% (Bosert).
• 63% of all software projects overrun their budgetary estimates, with the top 4 reasons all related to unforeseen usability problems (Lederer and Prassad).
• The percentage of software code that is devoted to the interface has been rising over the years, with an average of 47-60% of the code devoted to the interface (MacIntyre et al.).
• Ricoh found that 95% of the respondents to a survey never used three key features deliberately added to the product to make it more appealing. Customers either didn’t know these features existed, didn’t know how to use them, or didn’t understand them (Nussbaum and Neff).
• 80% of maintenance is due to unmet or unforeseen user requirements; only 20% is due to bugs or reliability problems (Martin and McClure; Pressman)
• A user-centered approach raised customer satisfaction with 40% (Gartner)

Perhaps usability gets downplayed because it’s all about soft and squishy feelings rather than detailed specifications, counter to the predisposition of most engineers.  Usability is centered on psychology and physiology of the user.  The goal is to make products that are more satisfying to use, easier to use, more efficient to use.  But in order to achieve this you must first improve your understanding of the users’ needs: what are their actual goals, challenges and limitations with the existing alternatives?  Are there any unique or unexpected ways in which they use the product?

And there are many examples of how usabilty helps attract and win customers inside and outside of the software industry. Think about how you choose products in your daily life.  Cars, appliances, snowblowers (yes it’s almost that season).  I just went through the process of buying a car and looked at a dozen different vehicles.  It’s amazing the difference between the way each carmaker goes about creating their interior environment and which conveniences they leave in or keep out.  How the layout makes you feel when you sit in the car and turn it on have as much if not more to do with your perception of the car then when you put your foot on the pedal.  Acura and Honda make very nice cars, but time and again the reviewers pilloried them for one of the most confusing center stacks in the business.  And for any of you who bought a BMW when their iDrive system first came out, did you buy a new BMW when the time came?

In the software industry Apple is the most obvious example.  Usability is the basis for the aura that Apple has created around it’s brand and a large part of why Apple customers are happy customers.  The iPod met tremendous success in large part to the simplicity of the wheel interface and now the iPhone/iPod Touch has reset the standard with touchscreens and cover flow technology.  Even when Apple runs advertising, the attributes they tout are rarely features (other than ground-breaking concepts like ‘cut and paste’), but more on the experience and connection that customers have with the product.  I mean, don’t you want to be as happy as Mac customers?  Moreover, Apple has been able to get premium pricing for their products — with inferior raw specs (e.g. small hard drives) — because they are intuitive, easy to use and they work.

TweetDeck I think is another great example of superior user-centered design.  It saw quick adoption and perhaps even quicker ripping-off of it’s UI.  Some may say imitation is the sincerest for of flattery, but I think it’s the best indication of intellectual laziness.

And what I wish more software companies would understand is that it’s not just about a pretty interface. Most of the UI projects we’ve seen at my company, Symphony Services, are driven by clients who want to update their UI, but the focus is on simply modernizing the look of their application, not necessarily in making and significant changes to what they have today.  Buzzwords like RIA and Flex abound in these conversations, but it’s all treated in a cursory fashion and does nothing to change the current user experience. The use of RIA’s may look nice and help in the marketing and launch of new versions of the product, but in the end it’s all lipstick on the pig and won’t move the needle.

In my next post I’ll dig into a few of the ways that a great UI can impact a software companies business and improve customer satisfaction.