"Humans want to be surrounded by beauty." - Susan Cain

Susan Cain was a keynote speaker at ASAE's Annual Meeting this past August, and when she uttered these words, I immediately thought of data management systems (stick with me here...).

One of the most common complaints I hear from my clients about their AMS systems is along the lines of "The user interface (both staff- and customer-facing) is ugly/hard to navigate/looks really old." Given that humans want to be surrounded by beauty, this complaint makes sense. After all, if staff finds the system unattractive or hard to understand, they are less likely to use it. The same is true for your members and customers. And lower user adoption rates mean worse data!

The challenge is that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." It's very difficult to say "This is beautiful" and have everyone agree. So what is to be done? Here are three things to keep in mind:

1. Understand that the UI does matter and you should do everything you can to improve it wherever you can.
2. Acknowledge that there will be disagreement both internally and from customers as to what is "beautiful."
3. Also acknowledge that in terms of UI, the definition of "beauty" changes over time. (Web designers are especially attuned to this. Remember rotating home pages/slide shows/carousels?)

So, like most things in data management, my advice is to "keep working on it." Create as much beauty as you can, and make sure you keep beauty in mind over time.