That's true in general, but not in this case. The UI shown in the screenshot violates every single usability principle for dialogues as defined in DIN ISO 9241-110 - and that's just one part of the screen! I'm 100% you put that in front on a random usability professional and he will immediately see that the UI is wrong.

Explain on top of that the scheme for the interest payments and he will notice that the UI does not fit to that purpose at all. Why would paying interests involve a wash account and a real money transfer at all? If that's the job to do the UI has to facilitate it directly, not with crazy schemes. That's Aufgabenangemessenheit (to be fit for the purpose, not sure about the official translation) and it's the highest dialogue principle. That got completely ignored here. This was never usability tested, I'm certain - or if it was the results were ignored.

Sorry, I think my post above was confusing. Please let me clarify:

There seems to be a huge number of fields-of-expertise that potentially have bearing on my life or work. E.g., urologists, transmission repair techs, indoor air quality experts, sleep therapists, house painters, early childhood education consultants, therapists/counselors, sports trainers, physical therapists, housecleaners, etc.

In my experience, most of those fields have practitioners who are sure they could help you avoid future problems; you just have to hire them to see the benefit! Or at the very least, invest time in helping them understand your particular situation so they can give more detailed advice.

I could easily believe that most of them are correct, too. But each of us, even in a business setting, has limited funds and time/bandwidth to deal with such specialists.

In my post above, I was trying to say that knowing which of these many specialists one should have engaged with isn't always clear ahead of time. E.g., maybe I didn't need to bring my car to a transmission repair shop, when the only real problem I'd have in the near year is back pain from poor sitting posture.

What you say is true, but a little bit off base I think. A team designed and developed this software. So this isn't shopping around for specialists, this is basic engineering practice to do risk analysis (by whatever name you call it). Two possibilities 1) there was no such process, or 2) the process didn't evaluate UI and workflows well.

In the first case, the teams basic competence is definitely in question. In the second, hopefully this sort of thing causes an improvement in the approach. Point being, this isn't really one of the vast number of possible things that could be looked at, rather it is a fundamental part of the bread-and-butter work of the team that shipped this product.

That being said, a lot of E2E front end stuff is done really poorly because of the way that these systems are sold and serviced. Sometimes they end up in bucket 1 (team unable or not allowed to do a competent job) by design.

I made a different assumption about what happened here. The tool as developed fit requirements very well. Over time, the tool started to be used for things that were progressively further and further away from its intended design; I imagine that sending to a wash account was (for example) some employee’s clever idea of how to make use of what they already had when their overbearing boss told them to “just make it work.” Then, having been shown to “work”, the process became reified.

Fair point, but part of risk analysis is looking at what can happen when a tool is not used as designed. Obviously you can't cover all eventualities, but one thing you should do is focus on the worst possible outcomes and work them backwards.

Ah, indeed I did not get that that's the point you wanted to make :) Reading it again I really jumped to a misinterpretation there. Sorry.

You are right, it's not as obvious that this is a half a billion dollar issue that usability work would have avoided as it is obvious that the UI is flawed. I jumped to "A usability professional would have noted that it's the wrong approach" and from there simplified to "see how flawed it is".