Cosmopolitan magazine certainly doesn't publish articles such as "Seven Hairstyles That Will Make Your Man Yawn." Wildly desirable is more like it. And so too, is it with great software. If you want your applications to be successful, you better make them wildly desirable.

My latest published research has identified seven key qualities that all applications must exhibit to be wildly desirable, with our choices based on research and inquiries on software design and architecture; assessment advisories with clients; and interviews with leading experts, including both practitioners and academics.

Forrester defines the seven qualities of software as:

The common requirements that all software applications must satisfy to be successful: user experience, availability, performance, scalability, adaptability, security, and economy.

All seven qualities are important, but if you get the user experience (UX) wrong, nothing else matters.

The UX is the part of your application that your employees and/or customers see and use daily. You can do an exceptional job on project management, requirements gathering, data management, testing, and coding, but if the user experience is poor, your results still be mediocre — or even a complete failure.