Today we had a brainstorming meeting with the business analyst for one of our major clients. We pitched a wireframe for a workflow addition to the application.
The analyst was excited. This fell in line with a meeting she’d had earlier. The main decision there was to replace a large portion of the UI with Microsoft Excel templates. Users don’t like the UI and want to just use the Excel spreadsheets they already have for passing data back and forth.
One of my co-workers sighed, “Users just like Excel. It’s got to be the most successful product ever.”
I’ve seen this repeatedly. I’m tasked to build a web-based UI to automate
business processes. Once it goes live, I find out users don’t want to use the UI — and always seem to wish they could just use Excel instead. And businesses seem unwilling to force users to use the custom application that seemed so important six months to a year before.
There’s certainly a requirements gathering and design problem that’s usually fundamental to causing this problem. There’s frequently also a training problem once the application is launched.
But why is it always Excel that people want to hang on to? Why is it so useful that it seems to drive a huge portion of business processes in companies large and small?
I think a large part of its appeal is the low barrier to entry - it’s pretty easy to create a simple spreadsheet. It’s easy to learn the basics of how to add fields and other simple functions. And it’s easier to format than Word. All this despite a fairly unintuitive UI.
What can we learn from the high use of Excel? What can we apply from those lessons to our own applications?