After spending a few months at an on-site project, the main “takeaway” was this: Using humor to highlight a problem – really bad interfaces. As ecommerce grows exponentially, small business owners have a growing need for ways to count, track, ship, and study inventory and the resulting patterns. But for the people who actually have to gather raw data and enter it into various  software application, most of these applications (often referred to as software as a service – SaaS) are extremely difficult to navigate.

People get (rightfully) frustrated when they have to take too many actions to perform a task. Good interaction design looks simple and obvious, but like all good design it take a long way to get from complexity to simplicity. Most interfaces are created by intelligent people who are good at processes, but aren’t able to focus on visualizations – how people will see and deal with the processes.

Good data visualization and interaction design are crucial!