| Maybe the world has changed now, but around 2006/2007 I was an embedded software engineer for a company that built public transport smart-card ticketing systems. I was working on a device that sat on a bus, operated by the driver. It had a monochrome screen with something like 640x480 resolution and around 16 or 18 buttons. One of the things the bus drivers needed to do was to sell tickets, but the number of buttons they needed to press to sell a ticket was like 10 or 12 when I started working on the software. I explained to our project manager who was in charge of the delivery that I could improve things to reduce the number of button presses to around half that amount, and it be much more usable for the drivers. She told me very sharply that I was never allowed to improve the software in any way by my own decisions. The only kind of improvements to UI/UX (which was not even a term back then) was after the customer requested it, because then my company would try to file it as a "change request" rather as a "bug" because that way they could squeeze more money from the customer. The flip side of that argument was that the company all too frequently would accept a loss on the main contract in order to win the bid (working in the public sector and all), and then have to earn money on all the change requests. It was one of the specific responsibilities of a project manager back in those days to drum up as many change requests from the customers as possible. It was horrible and I'm glad I don't work there any more, but I can sympathize with the problems from both sides of the aisle. |
Case in point: a customer (we do embedded design services) came to us to redesign a manufacturing tool and mentioned that it was used both in the US and Costa Rica. We suggested adding Spanish language screens because, well, it lets more people in Costa Rica use the device.
Problem was, the users pushed back because knowing English got them more money and they could be replaced by cheaper Spanish-only speaking people if we added the translations.
To the point of making money on the ECO's, the problem is that if all your competition is structuring their bids this way, then you have to do the same if you're to have a hope of winnning anything.