I’m against Russia invading Ukraine, or, really, any country invading another country. No good, very bad, don’t do it.

Enterprise software management software (ahem) have awful user interfaces. It is known. I don’t mean that they’re clunky or awkward as if designed by programmers who had to get something on the screen and have no aesthetic sensibility or sense of how attention flows. I mean that the user interfaces are tarted up with lots of color and curves and typography such that it looks, at a glance, like something amazing, but that is even harder to use than the previous awkward version. It’s as if Enterprise software now has to seem modern with lots of marketing-website-like flash, as well as have every claimable feature possible. Actual usability, still second class. These vendors know their business. Unfortunately, that business is that they sell software to people who don’t actually use it.

If you’re writing an issue tracker, make sure the issues are front and center and that the project management aspects are in the background. A new person will want to look at that project management stuff to get a sense of the overall status and scope of activity, but a day-to-day person wants to get straight to the queue they care about. They already know all the context.

If you’re writing a monitoring system, you want the errors and anomalies up front, not at the bottom of a knowledge hierarchy you have to click through to reach. Obvious, right? I think a lot of web sites or applications might achieve clarity if they thought of themselves as monitoring systems (even if they aren’t). Why do users open the app, and what do they want to see first if they have a limited amount of time? Design around that, even if just for a thought experiment.