The core difficulty is convincing somebody that user experience IS a business requirement.

Let us set the scene: A small television ad-agency of around 100 employees. Creative, Production, Replication, Sales, Media Purchasing, Finances, Management, Shipping, IT and Marketing all work in concert.

This company does it all. Finding products, producing spots, buying time on the air, duplicating and distributing video tapes and tracking sales.

They have an elaborate database keeping track of everything in motion. There is a minor breakdown in this system(well, there are many, but I'm focusing on this one). Replication needs work orders to copy a tape and ship it to a station.

These work orders are sheets of paper, in triplicate. They contain hand-copied information from the database, such as station name and address, the code of the tape, the required date of arrival and the preferred shipping method.

On some days, hundreds of requests come to the replication department and prioritization begins. But before triage begins the forms must be sorted.

Management knows about the problem. And they know it's expensive. Sorting and prioritizing takes up precious hours. With a five o'clock shipping deadline and limited VCRs, every minute you don't have a tape in a deck is a potentially large commission lost.

In comes IT. And requirements gathering begins. They're a hip, 'with it' bunch of guys and know how to ask the right questions. "What are you doing?" vs "How do you think a computer should do it?"

But even that isn't enough. Pressure is on to mechanize and automate the entire department. Every other department is in the system. Why isn't replication?

The solution is fraught with bar codes, complex color-coded prioritization schemes and a host of other features to let replicators know in an instant: "What tape do I make next?"

That system is ten years behind schedule. Has no hope of completion and most of what they really need could be implemented for a fraction of the cost.

What went wrong?

They thought of something other than the user experience. They focused on requirements. But those requirements are already met. Requests come in. Requests are prioritized. Tapes go out.

In their zeal to improve the efficiency of it all everybody had no sight of what they should have been doing.

Improving the user experience.

This is what they should have done. And had they been willing to listen it would have happened.

Simple no-brainer: stick the requests into a database. Only a minor fraction of the data on those forms was new information and a ridiculous amount of time was being wasted hand-copying it for each form.

Then give video technicians access to a simple column sorting view of this data.

Let the computer sort. Computers are good for sorting.

Let the humans prioritize. Humans are good for prioritizing. And the team in replication knows the infinitely complex prioritization system they use better than anybody in the world could. They know what attributes matter when, and when to escalate a time-crunch up the chain of command. What was really slowing them up was sorting hundreds of sheets of paper.

And there you have the vast majority of the time wasted in this process knocked out with the features more-or-less already implemented by the database in use.

Let other features get added on people see opportunities and say: "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if it did ..."

I worked in that replication facility before I got into programming. And it has shown me changing the way think about how to use a computer is a far more daunting task than any design I'll ever come up against.