By Steve Harriman
I just bought a new car and I really like it. I do have one complaint, however… its multi-media user interface. I won’t mention what make of car it is, but suffice it to say that I think the user interface is the result of German over-engineering. Now, I’m no expert in software design, but like everyone, I do have an opinion on it. In fact, bad user interface design is the reason I wound up working for a software company.
Way back in the ‘80s when computers were the size of school buses, I worked in IT. I was what they called a systems programmer and managed a small team of technicians who kept the mainframes running in support of the company’s engineering and business systems. One such system that was critical to the business was CICS, IBM’s popular OLTP. It ran well for the most part, but the development guys were cranking out new applications so fast that we were always debugging problems that caused outages or brown-outs.
To help me and my team find and fix these problems faster, I bought a nifty software debugging tool. There were three main products on the market at the time, including one from the leading performance management vendor of the day. But theirs was not the product I selected. Why not? The price was similar, it actually had slightly more functionality than the other products, and its support staff was very knowledgeable. But the product’s user interface was outdated–it was basically a command line interface that required you to remember a bunch of cryptic codes.
You see, I needed a tool for my whole team to use. But we weren’t all CICS experts, we were generalists. We were a small team that had to support four different operating systems, CICS, CAD/CAM systems, manufacturing systems, a campus network and remote locations, and some cute little machines the numerical control machine engineers used that were called micro computers (we would later call them PCs). I needed a tool that everyone could use with minimum training and expertise. So I made my choice primarily due to the intuitive interface that one of the three products—from an upstart software company—offered. The product didn’t intimidate me. It was easy and fun to use. It lead me by the hand as I drilled down from high-level summary views to detail data in a way that made sense to me.
Not long after I made my choice, I received a call from a head hunter. The company whose product I had rejected based on its user interface, wanted to talk to me about a job as a product manager. They were seeing the upstart company taking business away from them, and I guarantee the reason was the user interface. I wound up taking the job and I’ve been actively involved with ensuring good software design ever since.
So, back to my car. I get frustrated when I want to switch from listening to music to making a phone call via the Bluetooth connection. First, there are multiple ways to perform the function—often a symptom of poor design. Second, following the intuitive menu path leads me to the wrong outcome. And despite having made the same mistakes repeatedly, I have still not figured out the most efficient way to call for pizza. This technology is supposed to make phone use while driving safer, but I think the design engineers failed in that mission. Even my technology-savvy 14 year-old daughter has difficulty, so for once, I know it’s not me.
While IT management software may never have the consumer design appeal of Apple’s products, there is clearly a huge competitive advantage to be gained by vendors who invest in this area. So many product designs are created by engineers more skilled in software architecture than human factors. At CA, we certainly have room for improvement. That’s why I’m excited that Russell Wilson, NetQoS’ talented head of design, now has the broader purview of rationalizing the navigation and look-and-feel of all the products, with their different heritages, across CA’s entire Service Assurance portfolio.
He could probably teach those German engineers a thing or two as well.
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