It comes down to the difference between b2c and b2b business. In the case of b2c, you’re selling to consumers, who themselves use your UI and will leave if it’s bad.

In the case of b2b, it’s more complicated. You’re selling to office administrators, whose goal is to score the best deal for the company. Since they aren’t the primary users of the product, stuff like UX doesn’t matter as much as cost.

Best illustrated by Slack, which thought they could sell to businesses based on a beautiful UI, but their market was dominated by Microsoft Teams, which could sell better to enterprises.

Slack thought right; they did sell to businesses. Microsoft came later to the game, leveraging their size to both undercut them (with a feature rich free plan), and offer an integrated suite with the productivity tools that enterprises are already using (with Microsoft 365).

Which is probably one reason why Slack is looking to sell to Salesforce.

My point being I don't think Slack's positioning was "chat but prettier". The fact Teams is more dominant now seems more to do with bundling.

Doesnt Slack prove the opposite of your point? That building something that end users will like is a key selling point?

Teams dominates because Microsoft gave it away for free to those who were already paying Microsoft.

As a forcéd user of Teams, I have to say this, a thousand times over: it _sucks_, I -- and everyone I know -- _hates_ it and it seems to have been rushed out to crush the competition and integrate into Office online products. I also hate these and don't use them, but unfortunately some of my colleagues do.

But, you know what? Nobody cares about my opinion! You are exactly right: the people who make these decisions about what software the university "runs on" are at a far higher level, and have far more clout. Their incentives are totally misaligned with mine -- I use linux as a daily driver, and write highly mathematical software. I am exactly _not_ the target audience of these things, because, frankly, I can support myself: if something's broken, I fix it -- and don't consume IT's time. The people who _do_ however, are all of the admin staff, many of whom have professional backgrounds elsewhere, and think this is the way the world works. And they get promoted, and end up in managerial roles that make purchasing decisions at a high level. Hence, Teams.

Yep. I hate Teams too. It freezes my system for 30 seconds at startup, and spits out 404 Not Found errors sometimes when I log in.

But hey, nobody was ever fired for using Microsoft.

> stuff like UX doesn’t matter as much as cost

Sure but until the UI is so bad that you end up accidentally sending out money you didn't intend to, it is important.

Separately, In the business UI I used previously with Citizens it was so easy to get locked out of your account (and I had no time for phone calls, which was the only way to unlock it after that) that so many payments were made late because I had no other choice; my schedule was already full and the payment would only be made when I could schedule time for that stupid phone call.

That led to delays and late fees of sorts, and that is money as well, all because of a bad UX.

At a previous very well-known employer, they had also overpaid Oracle 5+ orders of magnitude for the value of their software and had an entire floor of developers, analysts, and other support roles building what they needed into purportedly “off the shelf” software.

One day, a novice-level Java error in Oracle’s code caused a multi-day outage requiring data to be restored from backups and reloaded to get any functionality back and several months of that group deploying duct tape to get everything working.

For a consumer app, people would leave in droves as one star reviews poured in. In this case, they solved this by inviting the relevant VP to a football game in the corporate box with the account rep, both of the same fraternity, and starting that Monday nobody in management talked about the outage publicly again.

Do enterprises change banks because of bad UI/UX? There's your answer.

Did you even read the article?

Did you even read his question?

Nowhere in the article (which I read in its entirety) does it answer the above reply's question. "Do companies consider good UI a competitive advantage when looking for a commercial bank or lender?" I don't know. But that's not addressed in the article.

My guess is that it probably isn't a huge consideration. Very few people interact with these interfaces. Maybe one or two controllers at a company would ever log into this. Even CEOs and top management would never actually log into these accounts directly. They are going to get their information from internal reports and BI dashboards. So I bet no one really cares. If Citi offers a $400M loan at 1.1% interest and JP Morgan offers the same loan at 1.3% interest, my guess is that that company is going with Citi. I doubt UI/UX makes a difference here. Although in the consumer world it does have an impact which is why we have seen many banks improving their apps and websites lately to compete in the consumer banking space.

You hit on the head with the difference in interest. At that sort of scale you're looking at a difference of almost a million dollars in just a year, even if I were doing that for my own personal account I don't think I'd consider a better UI to be worth a million dollars a year. Anyone in a corporate setting suggesting that amount should be swallowed so that someone interacting with the account a few times a month can do it a bit easier would be laughed out of the room.

Yeah, the corporate measure for "good/bad UX" is pretty much "how many full time employees will we have to hire to deal with the worse UX or how many employees will we be able to save due to the better UX?". Convenience matters for productivity, but usually not that much - I have seen some UX'es so bad that you'd have extra dedicated employees just to deal with their horribleness, but even then it's cheaper just to hire one or two extra people than spend many millions and person-years on system migration.

I am in such a position and I've done exactly what you think i should do to alleviate the problem.

Ive gone so far as to open 4 accounts with different banks to do actual tests

The biggest issue i found is that no bank offers a "free trial" of its own to facilitate discovery.

I have filled at least a dozen firms twice becuase the bank wants "wet ink" signatures

I had to overlook those instances just so i could test the UI, but honestly, its an exercise in supreme patience and i am afraid my whole effort will be pointless. I suspect all 5 banks will be equally bad.

Did you read the context of my reply? I know the article is about bad internal UI/UX. But my understanding of what the person I am replying to said was that businesses have to put up with terrible UI/UX for their banking portals. Which I anecdotally know to be true, at least with Canadian banks.

The business banking portal is often much worse than the consumer one.

There's generally no relationship whatsoever between the customer-facing UI and the internal UI used by bank employees as in this article, those tend to be separate systems with minimal, 'arms-length' integration.

I've used credit unions that managed to have worse UIs than Citizens Bank. Can't say I've used Citibank though. Ally seems to have it figured out pretty well, which they kind of have to.