projekt202 asks retail IT providers:

Who’s in charge of your user experience?

By members of projekt202

In January 2004, projekt202 descended upon the National Retail Federation’s 93rd Annual Convention & Expo in New York City to review user-interface (UI) trends among the world’s leading and fastest growing software companies.

The National Retail Federation (NRF) is the largest trade association representing the needs of the world’s retailers. Its yearly “Big Show” attracts all of the top companies trying to attract the business of those retailers — no trivial feat, since retail is hot right now and expected to only get hotter.

The scene

With the retail sector projected to be one of the most active in IT spend for 2004, nearly every well-known software company — from retail pure-plays like Retek and JDA and about a gazillion niche players, to the giants and enterprise-software providers like SAP, Microsoft, Sun, Lawson, i2 and Oracle — were represented at NRF, hocking the products they had either built or modified to address retailers’ needs.

We managed to hit about 50 of the 300+ booths to see how well user-experience is fairing in this important sector. Here’s a quick recap of some of the themes we spotted.

The power of a poor product demo

About half of the product walkthroughs we observed suffered from a nearly fatal blunder — an unexpected error message, horrendously slow processing period or complete computer lockup — that threw the presenter off course and into a series of stammers, apologies and desperate clicks. Such stumbles clearly erode the prospect’s confidence in the product, a practical death wish to the sale.

In an obviously fake environment, there is simply no excuse for any processing speed less than blazing, for not testing the product with the sales script, or for failing to restart the computer prior to switching on the projector.