[Spooky23]

You need to convince a user to adopt in B2C. There needs to be a benefit to them and you need to understand them.

I run a large line of business in a big “E”. Our requirements may not even be known to the end users and may make their lives miserable. Nobody cares.

We have lots of money, but I can’t tell the taxing authority that we can’t comply with some demand in 3 months because our finance clerks will be miserable, and I can’t get the engineering resources allocated to some administrative process at the expense of the customer. We do look at process engineering and often find ways to fix things that are really bad — but end of the day making things pretty for enterprise users is at best a secondary priority.

[doctor_eval]

I understand this. And in your case maybe it makes sense. But does the enterprise ever consider the cost of making the finance clerks miserable? These costs can be in terms of staff retention, acquisition, and especially efficiency.

Honest question. I’ve done consulting in big-E (telco) and internal user ergonomics are more often than not thrown under the bus in the name of pet product feature from some noisy but inexperienced stakeholder that are not needed in practice. This doesn’t apply to your example, but in my case compliance was already considered, and didn’t change often. Yet still, they seemed to hate the internal users.

I always felt that there was an economic case to be made for making users lives less miserable, and I’ve come to the conclusion that in most cases enterprise software is bad due to cultural and political reasons (lack of ability to say no to stupid features, lack of discipline around feature implementation, lack of domain knowledge, artificial time pressure, etc) rather than economic reasons.