“Intuitiveness” in the context of Enterprise Software

As a designer, the ultimate aim of my job is to make the Product I am involved with easy or intuitive to use. How do you judge the ease of use or intuitiveness of your software? For common consumer product like Mail or Ticket Booking software, we are often given the age old wisdom of “If my mother can use it conveniently, it is intuitive”

But how do you define “Easy” or “Intuitive” in Enterprise Software or Administration and Monitoring Tools? It is senseless to assume that a user can use complex software without any training or help whatsoever.

The ‘Ease’ or ‘Intuitiveness’ needs to be measurable. Anything which cannot be measured, cannot be compared. And so, a difference between the ‘Intuitiveness’ of 2 softwares, cannot be defined. (This is precisely what is the aim of Benchmark Usability Testing)

Also, the perception of ‘Simplicity’ itself varies from context to context.

The average user of Enterprise Software expects a certain learning curve or training for the software, and this expectation is factored in while defining simplicity for such a software.

Whereas, even a very small Learning Curve might prove fatal for a Consumer software like Mail, typically because a user’s motivation for learning such a software is much lesser than software necessary to do their jobs in their workplace.

Below are a few parameters which can be measured to judge the ‘intuitiveness’ in the context of any complex software:

• Measure the steepness of the Learning curve in terms of the no. of man hours of training required
• No. of trained FTEs required to do the job, for a particular volume of work (no. of Systems monitored, no. of Alerts resolved, no. of Purchase Orders processed?)
• Measuring Task Completion rates, Task completion times
• How conveniently it allows the user to do the task vs how a user would have accomplished the task in the absence of the software; How much does it reduce the dependency of the user on ‘Workarounds’: (No. of manhours saved?)