“People who run (baseball) clubs think in terms of buying players. Your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs…What I see is an imperfect understanding of where runs come from. Baseball thinking is medieval.”  

• Peter Brand (Moneyball)

The title of this blog paraphrases what a young Peter Brand said to Oakland A’s general manager Billy Bean in the film Moneyball. Brand explained that the baseball establishment is asking all the wrong questions and that the key to building a winning team is not what they believed it to be.

As Beane put it, “There are rich teams, there are poor teams, there is fifty feet of crap, and then there is us.” In other words, a team without the resources to buy top-tier players. The film is about how he used the theories described in The Bill James Baseball Abstract and turned an impoverished team into a winner.

Peter Brand utilized the mathematics described in the Abstract and wrote the software to build a championship team that was affordable. This was a concept that flew in the face of the historical patterns of how players were judged and evaluated for abilities. 

UI/UX Falls Short

So, what does this have to do with enterprise software? Not what you think.

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) are the primary ways that allow people to interact with software. 

If Peter had given it any thought, he might have concluded that the UI/UX of many enterprise software systems is just as outdated as the approaches that baseball teams were using to build rosters. 

Believe it or not, many design concepts date back to the early 1900’s, particularly the concept of Gestalt psychology in UI/UX. 

Gestalt: How Our Brains Are Hardwired

Gestalt psychology describes how the brain perceives patterns. By its nature, our brain is hardwired to organize visual information into patterns based on preset design principles. 

Gestalt psychology was founded on the works by Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka. Born in Germany in the late 1800s. The concept focuses on:

• How we intake information through our senses.

• How our brains (through learned responses, memory, and stored patterns) ultimately create a perception of what we are experiencing and have experienced.

Gestalt uses seven fundamental principles. In this blog we look at two:

Proximity: Things that are close together appear to be more related than things that are spaced farther apart. Proximity is so powerful that it overrides similarity of color, shape, and other factors that might differentiate a group of objects.

Similarity: When things appear to be similar to each other, we mentally group them together. And we also tend to think they have the same function. A variety of design elements, like color and organization, can be used to establish similar groups.

Below in the figure are examples of these two principles and four additional ones. 

When used in context, for example, we don’t see individual items such as windows, glass, siding, and doors. Instead, we see the entire collection as a whole and perceive it as a house. Further, each principle continues toward providing us visual information about the house and ultimately creates a perception and emotional connection of what that house is. 

Gestalt and UI/UX

So how does this relate to Enterprise software?

Gestalt principles apply to how we perceive UI/UX in software. Take a look at these two examples showing the same data but different design.

Fig.1 There is a title and, directly below it, the data associated with that title. Both are text-based and their proximity suggests they have something to do with each other. This is one of the reasons spacing is so hypercritical in design. Even a slight fluctuation changes perception. 

Next, we see that the font size/style and color of the title and data are very similar. This creates a problem. The font colors and sizes are so close that similarity leads the brain to override the idea that one line is the title and the second line is the data.  

Our brains perceive them as similar, when in reality they are not. Even though your conscious mind understands this, the hardwired aspect of the brain experiences cognitive dissonance.

Now look at Fig 2. n. In this case proximity is kept intact, but similarity is modified. The brain clearly accepts that these are related but the slight color difference helps us understand they are not similar. 

Creativity is not simply being different for the sake of being different. It’s a matter of taking something and applying the tools of a craft like Gestalt Psychology to to create useful and meaningful patterns in design. 

Experimentation and Iteration

Steve Jobs was a master of understanding Gestalt psychology, and his team, including former Chief Design Officer Jony Ive, spent an enormous amount of time crafting the experience of using Apple’s products, regardless of what those products were. 

Jobs understood that humans are emotional and pattern-based creatures who operate in a very primordial fashion. 

Even though a cell phone consists of microchips, a battery, an antenna, a screen, and so on, how that phone feels, looks, and interacts will ultimately determine a buyer’s:

• Emotional attachment

• Decision to buy the phone

The technical specs – things like the pixel quality of the phone’s camera – are conscious-based, but the UI/UX of the app registers and creates an emotional connection for your use of the app. 

Developers Concentrate on Features over Design

So why does enterprise UI/UX suffer? It largely has to do with the emphasis on features, functionality, architecture, and engineering. Without these there would be no product so it is natural to focus on them. With that being said, design is often either viewed as a necessary afterthought, similar to being the tail light and not the headlight. Even partners responsible for implementing large-scale systems, on behalf of the software’s vendor, often lack the skills in the area of UI/UX, despite being placed in charge of these types of projects. 

This deficiency is abundantly clear when you place an enterprise software system’s UI/UX next to a consumer software product. 

Remember, consumers experience UX/UX like Netflix’s home streaming, with its well laid out and easy to navigate system, all the while thumbing on mobile devices seeking to provide the best experience possible. 

Then on Monday, they’re back on the job, staring at their clunky enterprise screens. 

Forsooth!!

Innovate or Die

Near the end of the film Moneyball, John Henry, then the owner of the Boston Red Sox, tries to hire Billy Beane as his general manager. Henry explains the future: 

“You won the exact same number of games that the Yankees won, but the Yankees spent one point four million per win and you paid two hundred and sixty thousand.”

“I mean, anybody who’s not building a team right and rebuilding it using your model, they’re dinosaurs. They’ll be sitting on their ass on the sofa in October, watching the Boston Red Sox win the World Series.” 

The lesson here is that smaller firms can use the power of design resources to give them an edge and compete with much larger companies. Pass the Gestalt.