SharePoint 2007
Some years ago I designed an expert system to advise cotton farmers about the appropriate choice of pesticides. We spent a lot of effort dealing with some major technical challenges to turn research techniques into a commercial product. Unfortunately, we didn’t spend as much effort dealing with how it would be deployed to the real target audience: farm managers with little experience of computers.
It’s not (just) that we didn’t think enough about the software’s user interface, but we didn’t consider how the farmers would need to change their behavior to make effective use of the expertise that the software made available to them. As far as I can tell, this project became one of the 19% of IT projects that were never used
