I’m not a UI/UX designer, but we want to apply a little bit of Jakob’s Law, which is from someone who spent some time studying how people use mobile apps. So when people see things that have been on other applications, they expect it to be the same on yours. This applies to internal tools. If you’re coming from a traditional setup, we’re not really trying to replicate everything. Remember, we’re looking for a simplified version that our team members can use. We want it to be almost similar, but the best of both environments. We want the features that they had to be replicated here. We want them to still be able to track their projects. We want them to still be able to track clients. We want a CRM that looks at the names, the addresses, email. We want something that, when we click on the email address, it directs us to the email. We don’t want a situation where they have to take multiple steps, more steps than they did in the previous tools.
So we study this behavior, we look at the expected things, and we try as much as possible to have them on these custom apps. We cannot expect people to come into a “simple” interface, but then they are taking the extra steps that they did not even take in the more rigid traditional tools. No. The familiarity that comes from using common patterns is not a sign of laziness or lack of creativity. It’s a sign that you respect your users’ time and their existing mental models.