Why shouldn't business software be designed to make its users happy?

Novell announced yesterday that it's releasing "core components" of its NetMail "collaboration server product" under a combination of two open-source licenses, the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and the Mozilla Public License (MPL). The spun-off open-source project is named the "Hula Project." Opinions are beginning to circulate about whether "groupware" makes for a good open-source project. Some of the comments out there made me wonder why we don't have better business software.

Jamie Zawinski, former Netscape programmer turned nightclub owner, suspects that the project will founder, and expounded on his belief in characteristic fashion on his LiveJournal. Clay Shirky quoted some key passages over at Many-to-Many, and I'll quote some of them below, too.

Zawinski says Hula won't work out as an open-source project because it won't make its users happy, and independent coders won't be motivated to jump in and be part of the project. Possibly true.

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy.

Zawinsky's concern is that the Hula project will not attract open-source coders because it lacks an intrinsic sexiness or coolness factor. "With a product like that, there was going to be no teenager in his basement hacking on it just because it was cool, or because it doing so made his life easier. Maybe IBM would throw some bucks at a developer or two to help out with it, because it might be cheaper to pay someone to write software than to just buy it off the shelf."

Beyond that, though, I want to ask why we settle for "enterprise" software that's hard to use and bogs its users down. Jamie Zawinsky's rant promotes software that "makes people happy" by helping them do things that they already want to do. I would extend that principle to say that using business software should be easy. Business software should also be engineered to make the user as "happy" as possible from a usability perspective. I have had few moments more frustrating than when I've been working on a project and poorly-designed computer software only got in my way.

If I had employees, I'd want to have tools that they would like using. I'd propose that enterprise business software should, at a minimum:

• Help the user get something done — communicate, schedule an appointment, solve a problem, think clearly.
• In the process, also make the user feel like she or he is getting something done. (Hint: this may be best accomplished by reducing, rather than increasing, the number of interface cues. Successfully completing extra steps arbitrarily imposed by software or interface design does not make me feel like I've accomplished anything other than fighting software.)
• Stay out of the user's way — the program's design and human interface should be carefully engineered to facilitate the purpose of the program, but never to interfere with it.
• Prevent information overload. Information overload comes in many forms, of which an overcrowded interface is only one.

The more I think about it, the more those propositions all seem like corollaries of each other. This is my first foray into thinking about business software that way, so I'm sure I've left something out in this over-general, amateur software design rant. Perhaps my friend studying for his Ph.D. with a concentration in human-computer interaction will have something to add. But I'll leave it at that for now.

I've read a lot of pitches for enterprise software that's supposed to improve employee efficiency, trim the "bottom line," and improve communication and planning within an organization.

That's a fine place to start, but I really want software that can deliver on a pitch that goes something like, "Not only will this software make your employees more effective, but they'll like using it. You won't have to cajole them or force them to take training courses because they'll want to use the software anyway, and it's so well-designed that they won't really need (much? any?) training. They won't have to waste time figuring it out. Give this to your employees, and they'll leave at the end of the day feeling like they got more done. That's because they did. And they'll come to work a little happier the next day."

Who could turn that down? Is there anything out there that can make that kind of sales pitch, let alone deliver on it? Shouldn't that be the business software designer's goal just as much as for any other software writer?

Zawinski says, "If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy." I say, managers ought to want to buy software that people want to use at work; I'm just not sure who makes it.

See also: Tim Bray on collaboration tools.