Making enterprise software better by replicating successful Web 2.0 user interface paradigm

January 26, 2011

Infusing Web 2.0 experience into your business application development

Last year I wrote a blog post about the prevalent lack of user-friendly user interfaces among enterprise business software packages. This is not an automatic consequence of product and development issues at enterprise software companies. Rather, it reflects the difficulty of bringing about a streamlined, intuitive user interface for complex software systems that do very specialized tasks.

In that article, I highlighted “customization” as one of the design paradigms that enterprise software vendors should learn from consumer facing web developers who have become phenomenally successful at building large, extremely popular Web 2.0 sites serving millions of satisfied users.

At the time, I cited Twitter, Dropbox and Basecamp as some examples of those consumer facing web-based applications that became very successful in no small part by their shrewd user experience design.

Well, just very recently, Derek Singleton, an analyst at Software Advice, ran a nice online poll on top Web 2.0 UI themes that should be incorporated into business applications. The top features are, in order of popularity:

– AJAX or Lightbox type refreshes, which eliminate new page loading
– Google-like instant search
– More “white space” in the user interface
– Context-sensitive navigation

Surprisingly, as Derek noted, the supposed “social” features did not rank as high, even though they make the list – Twitter-like feeds garnered 6% of the votes, while the Facebook Like button garnered only 5% of the votes, lower than Mint’s celebrated drill down flash charts and mobile-enabled UI.

While some of these top requested features are not unexpected, the influence of software and web heavy weights like Google and Microsoft is palpable: Google’s instant search suggestion feature is much desired, and Microsoft is pushing the envelope of context-sensitive navigation with the “ribbon” user interface. Both appear to be well positioned to enter the canon of user interface design.

The lower number of votes for the social features should not cause the product management teams to abandon plans for these features. In fact, I would argue that these results call for those features to be present via integration with Twitter and Facebook. It will take away the cost of creating your own microblogging features, and leverage the network and platform built by those social network giants.

While customization is not listed, I am still convinced it is also one of the important Web 2.0 themes that will make its way into the business application product strategy development, as the above-mentioned themes are surely making their impact on the look and feel of modern business applications.

Please check out the full write up at Derek’s blog for the full list of UI features.

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.