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Comment by neogodless

6 hours ago

For business, software applications are tools that facilitate "the thing" that generates money. (We in the software world think that _thing_ is software and software _features_, but outside that world, there's usually a different _thing_.)

The bottleneck for making software applications better at being used by (non-software) businesses is making sure the software does all the software things that actually benefit the business. Save time. Make humans more productive. Reduce human error. Make the business more efficient. Increase profit margins.

All of those things are a bit difficult to predict and quantify. You start with ideas of what might help the business, you maybe design, prototype, trial. Ultimately you build or enhance software applications, and try to measure how well they're making the business better.

In all of this, making sure software is addressing the right problem in the right way, and ultimately making the business better - that's a hard problem! Regardless of how fast and easy it is to make software.

But yes, the speed can really help. You can prototype and trial and improve the feedback loop.

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neogodless

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skydhash  6 hours ago

> But yes, the speed can really help. You can prototype and trial and improve the feedback loop.

Based on what I’ve seen, prototyping has been always easy. You don’t even have to build software for the first iteration. For UI stuff you can use a wire-framing tool.

What has happened is that we abandoned the faster iteration methods (design think tank, quick demo and UX research,…) and we have full in on building the first idea that came in and fostering it on the users. That process is very slow and more often goes wrong.