My friend was over earlier this morning to pick up some stuff and we started talking about the poor UI in your typical financial and business applications (even the very thoroughly researched Bloomberg terminal). There so much innovations yet to be done in these applications, and it’s much easier to get people to pay up for business software than to get people to pay for consumer software (and also they’ll have to pony up more cash if they get caught stealing).
I think one of the big issues that the performance of these financial and business applications’ performances are typically measured on machine response times only. What most of these business decision makers aren’t realizing is that human response time should be considered as factor too when evaluating these systems.
Yet, financial firms are pourring endless amount of money on improving their data algorithms. I am not saying that we shouldn’t improve the data process efficiency, but the end-users of the system should also be considered. These end-users are also ultimately the ones that will influence purchase decisions and the reputation of the product in the marketplace.
But, as good software project managers, we’ll have to put some numbers with the business decision. Which of the following do you think has a greater return on investment? Spending 40 developer-hours on improving an algorithm for importing data by 0.01 milliseconds, or spending 10 designer-hours on improving the readability of the data by 0.5 seconds? Since the slowest part of any computer system is of course the human!
End-users don’t want to think about what is running in the background, all they want is to have the correct and relevant data on the screen. If it has an awful colour contrast ratio, they are going to take twice as long to read the same line of text.
Good product design is not exactly rocket science, but I’m surprised to see that they almost never appear in financial applications. I see there being a lot of good money to be made in improving financial application UIs in the next few years. In some sense, I’d probably call it economic innovation, because those financial analysts can think about bigger things like ABCPs or hedging funds instead of pressing their face against the monitor to see what’s on their screen.