Thought I'd point you guys to a nice blog post I came across recently. Derek Singleton, ERP Market Analyst, Software Advice, did a survey on the "Ten Consumer WEB UI themes We'd Like to see in Business Applications".
I posted a reply over there that I thought was very applicable to this whole debate around the User Experience and my passions on it at OpenSpan.
Net Net, we keep piling applications onto our user desktops and rarely do we think about the user experience or how to make the user more productive through the UI. Derek's survey proves we are not thinking enough given his survey results!
I would also add that I am not a big fan of the major inconsistent UI's in either the enterprise or consumer world either, i.e. why does the stop button not actually do a stop and leave me on the page I was on. Why does the back button not do a true back when it can (it really is a Refresh last which is a pain on a slow PDA connection) and why by default does a backspace do a back (which can happen frequently by accident when not in a text box and causes a loss of work).. amongst many "web" UI grievances I have.
I hope Derek (and I'd be happy to help) starts getting more granular in this UI discussion. We take desktop apps and improve (through automation) the manual navigation around the UI's that results in our customers saving millions of dollars per year in productivity gains (User Process Improvement). In many cases tens of millions of dollars!
