edbloom

I'm charged with producing a technical architecture for a big enterprise web app. The scope of the application involves lots of moving parts which end up making a consumer financial services website with including purchasing stocks/financial products online.

Nothing too out of the ordinary apart from lots of SOA/enterprise systems integration complexity.

The biggest challenge I face is not really how I would build this, but how the client would like it built. They want a custom CMS to control almost every aspect of how the system business logic works. This will naturally add huge overhead to the build and is making it very hard to quantify. Red flags are popping up everywhere with regard to managing scope. This is looking like a big multi-year project.

I'm curious as to how others deal with this? Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

I've HAD it with Youtube UI redesigns. For the last several UI iterations, they've tried to force a new UI and user experience on users where one of the most common use cases, browsing by Popularity in the last X (i.e. Day, Week, Month) has been almost removed from the site (there is a sub standard experience via Charts). For years this was how I used youtube - go see what is popular now/recently. Now they're trying to force a channel based experience on to users - confusing a fktonne of their userbase.

Clearly this is a case of the big G trying to optimize Youtube revenues but if anything it significantly diminishes how long I spend on youtube as a property. It strikes me as the kind of dumbass thinking that you might expect to see at an "old world media" conglomerate trying to keep a struggling dot com era venture alive - and not the actions of an Internet powerhouse with some of the smartest people on the planet.

Is it just me or does this piss anyone else off?

I'm really interested to know what other examples people have of infuriating UI decisions that just mess up a perfectly good product?