Usability in Software – Interesting Data

In Ray Wang’s recent blog (Software Insider’s POV), he shares some interesting data on how enterprises select software solutions. As you would expect, the functionality offered by the software is still the most important factor considered. However, I was struck by 2 statistics that Ray shared.

Firstly, there was a considerable drop in the requirement for Microsoft Office integration - 83.38% (Q4 2009) to 54.61% (Q2 2010) – although this is still a major factor -  and secondly the fact that Usability/User Experience has not altered much 67% (Q4 2009)  to 65% (Q2 2010). This is very much in line with what we are seeing amongst our customers and prospects at Winshuttle. Office remains the key tool for most knowledge workers within an enterprise, but now there are many more desktop tools that people are comfortable with and familiar using – Portals, Browsers, PDF’s, Mobile Devices, etc. We are seeing a lot of requests around projects that don’t use Excel or any other members of the Office family. However, it’s the secondary statistic that we believe is the more important one. It doesn’t matter what interface or application you are using if it’s not usable, it won’t help solve the issue.

Winshuttle believes the easiest way to produce usable solutions is to let the users involved in any process improvement project have a much bigger role than they traditionally have had. In fact, with the right tools they could even help build the solution themselves. We have written about this in a recent white paper (How SAP Users hold the key to Business Process Improvement) , so it’s good to see the statistics support this.