ePurchasing applications have reached a fair level of maturity which has changed the focus of providers from adding more features to their products to actually improving and optimizing existing tools and processes. Of course as an application provider you need to show innovation in your product lines but the feature war seems to have calmed down a lot comparing to a few years back.
This is good for the customer side because usability actually moved form “Nice to have, let’s do it later!” to the top of the requirements agenda. If you compare the different ePurchasing applications on the market you will realize that they will all pretty much match up with your main requirements. Of course there are different bells and whistles but all tools will help you to get your stuff done the one way or the other. The differentiation factor is usability, performance, effectivness and beauty … or before we get to romantic here lets call it “layout of the user interface”.
- Is the system friendly to use?
- Is the user interface self explaining?
- Can a new user get thru the process without any training?
- Howquick can I get things done?
- Usability drives adoption – rolling out an ugly system is much harder than introducing a nice, lean and fast user interface. Even if the ugly inteface can do more you will need to push your users much harder to work with it.
- Or why do you buy your books on amazon? Because amazon has so many features? No, because it makes buying simple.
So when you post your next change request to your application provider I would like you to reflect on this? Will the change blow up complexity or will it make work easier? Not just for you – for everyone!
