The average smartphone owner has far more games than enterprise applications on his or her device — and it isn’t hard to see why. “When you look at the enterprise applications that are in market today, they’re horrible experiences, both for design time and run time,” said George K. Mathew, president and COO of business intelligence firm Alteryx.
“You’ve got people who are trained on great video games, all the way up through their 20s and beyond, and you enter the workforce, and you have these amazingly horrible experiences in your enterprise applications. I think [Salesforce.com CEO] Marc Benioff deserves credit on this. He said that just like there was an Arab spring, there is going to be a corporate spring where people will just revolt against the applications in their enterprise. I think it started with mobile. The applications are better than they were two or three years ago. People want better enterprise experiences.”
The article offers enterprise application development pros a number of lessons they could learn from game developers including the following:
- Adopt simple user interfaces.
- Communicate with your users.
- “One incredibly good programmer is worth 100 novices.”
- Provide opportunities for users to be creative.
- Make your work environment fun.
- Throw release parties.
- Adopt Agile software development practices.
- Work visually.
- Reuse old tools and code.
