The Price of Everything

I needed a car for a few days in Denver earlier this week. I heard Chrysler is becoming American again, so I wanted to tool around in a Dodge Charger.

The car only had 5,000 miles and looked pretty sharp, but when I got to the checkout booth, I heard horrible valve tap (a good sign the engine is in trouble). The guard not only heard it too, he noticed it on a different new Charger last week.

The rental agency quickly hooked me up with a different car and I was on my way. I had the car up to a whiny 25 mph before I realized I was stuck in first gear. Turns out the car has Tiptronic-type shifting (automatic, but you have to wiggle the gear shift to change gears). Unfortunately, the designer didn’t make this obvious to the user (build one position for normal and one position for Tiptronic).

All it takes is a nudge on the gear shift and you’re locked in first. Pretty natural for a manual driver or just about anyone with a right arm.

Mystery solved. The previous driver was distracted by kids in the backseat or finding his way in a new town. He didn’t notice the plague-of-angry-wasps sound, so he redlined on the highway for five minutes before catching on.

Note to Detroit: don’t make it easy for drivers to accidentally wreck expensive machinery.

Which brings us to software.

Everyone has used software designed to enrage humans. We bankers have suffered worse than anyone - I shudder when I remember working with one particular core processing system.

User interface is often an afterthought. But good user interface is more than having a pleasant day at work. Good user interface makes it harder to get bad results.

Interface becomes more important in complex business domains, like deposit pricing. There are just a heck of a lot of intricacies when the job is done properly. Bootstrapped forward curves, activity-based costing, maximized economic values, data cleansing, nonlinear predictive analytics, and so on.

A crisp interface is all that stands between the user and information overload. Some of the basics:

1. Stick to familiar ground. Make the application work like it came from Microsoft. In fact, if you need to present complex data, use Excel for building reports and editing data.
2. Stay consistent. If you refer to a “rate scheme” in one place and a “rate outlook” in another, users will spend more time thinking about trivia and less about their business issues.
3. Organize, organize. Make sure the software is lined up with the user’s internal model for how the underlying problem works. Precise organization allows people to look deeply into complexity when needed, but not worry about most concepts most of the time.
4. Take the time to refine. Even a great designer will not create a perfect interface from the outset. Great ui comes from removing a thousand tiny snags.
5. Watch for user “mistakes”. User errors are maps to better ui. What cues misled the user? How can the software subtly nudge the user in the right direction next time?

UI is much more than pretty graphics (also good, but the equivalent of the Charger’s beautifully aggressive styling). UI is the combination of a thousand subtle design choices that keep the user in control. UI refinement may be difficult to notice during a sales demo, but is critical in real usage.

Business software is never going to reach the heights of iPod-level design. Bad software design is unlikely to leave a family stranded on the shoulder of I-70 with a seized engine. But the goal of our software is also important: make the bank millions in extra profits through price optimization.

It’s worth making sure ui doesn’t stand in the way of results.

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