As time goes by, I have started appreciating usability much more than any feature in software. For that matter, anything. Using a well-designed product is so much more fun that using a feature-rich but difficult to use product. Did I hear someone say "The GIMP"?
Today I was in a well-known hospital who had their registration and billing software custom-made by one of the biggest software services companies in India. I am not going to call names, but lets just say it is the company that is largely owned by one of the richest persons in India. They charged me registration and consultation fees upfront and everything was fine until I was about to leave, when they had to charge some more fees due to the doctor. The software raised an exception that consultation fees cannot be charged two times. There was no other category to put the fees under that would allow the money to go to the doctor and not the hospital. Further, the consultation fees was fixed by the administrator and the lady handling billing system could not change it. After a number of phone calls, she caught hold of the administrator who provided a lengthy workaround to the problem. No wonder, she was cursing the software and the company who wrote it :-)
I wonder how much of actual field testing is done before deploying such software. Do they hand it over to real-world people to try it in actual day-to-day scenarios or just sit in the offices, think of possible scenarios, write the code based on their assumptions and roll out the product.
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