Business software is too difficult to use

UK plc loses an estimated £63bn a year because office workers find it difficult to use business software, revels a recent survey from UK based Globel Graphics. Over three quarters (77 per cent) of UK office workers say they have found business software difficult to use. The two most common complaints are that software applications offer too much functionality, and a lack of training. “Organisations invest millions on training their employees how to use business software. Yet employees are using Facebook, Myspace, iPhones and digitalising their music without any training at all,” says Gary Fry, CEO, Global Graphics.

IMC aims to deal with this problem on several levels. First and foremost, we place emphasis on the good usability of our own products. Our authoring solution POWERTRAINER has been recognised on several occasions for its user-friendliness, and we are currently working on a major CLIX usability project. We can offer end users an important support tool when using complex business software, in the form of our Electronic Performance Support System LIVECONTEXT.

We have read the Global Graphics research with great interest and have summarised the major findings for you:

Loss of time by the use of complicated software
A surprisingly high 69 percent of office workers estimate they lose up to an hour every working week as a result of business software being difficult to use, with a further 23 per cent saying they lose up to five hours every week. The sheer number of different applications and the way different office applications work with each other is a prime reason for the losses.

Users ask for better systems
The research also shows that office workers are frustrated that software developers are not putting in enough effort to make sure their software is easy to use. Far from suffering technophobia, office workers say that consumer technology such as iPods, digital cameras and games consoles are easier to use than technology in the office. Consumer technology companies make money by attracting as many users as possible and that means making products easy to use.
How to boost productivity
By making business software as easy to use as consumer technology, employees are more efficient and less frustrated while companies benefit from lower training costs and higher productivity. Office workers have to draw information from an ever-increasing range of sources, in a range of different and evolving formats. Yet 56 per cent of office workers say they would find it difficult to take pages of information from a variety of different file formats and combine them into a new document. The warning to developers of business software is clear; take a leaf out of the consumer world and make your software easier to use. Make sure it quickly and easily does exactly what the user wants, and focus on that instead of adding more and more features and functions that only a handful of ‘power-users’ will ever need.