Don't Do This

I realize I'm making an assumption here, but I'm pretty sure I know how this happened... They made the interface and somebody said "how do I add a customer?!" The programmer, thinking it was painfully obvious said to himself "what's this ass-clown talking about?! It's right there!" and proceeds to add the obnoxiously large "Add Customer" button you see in the middle, threatening to create a gravitational well that might consume the known universe. "There!" the programmer says, "now he can't bitch!"

The existing "Add New Customer" button in the upper right, however obvious it may have seemed to the programmer in question, is visually married to a couple of unrelated tasks (go home and log out) and buried because it's not only sandwiched between home and log out but also between the sales person's name and the search forms in the bar below. This interface isn't designed in a way that naturally draws the viewer's eyes across the page such that they would see the tools they need in an appropriate order or context. A person looking at it for the first time sees "no customer selected" first, followed by a couple of search forms, leaving the remaining buttons and text above them in their peripheral. So unless you yourself created this page and so have a prior understanding of it, there's not a strong reason to immediately see how to create a new customer.

The phrase on the left, "no customer selected" is where name and basic information about a customer will appear and is a much more logical place for a link to add a new customer. That text is linked, though unfortunately it's not linked to the add-customer task, it's linked to "home". It probably should say "No customer selected - Add/Search" or have the "add customer" button otherwise next to the customer search form.

Don't do this. Don't assume the customer is incompetent when they're confused by an interface about which you have a prior understanding. The end result as you see here might destroy the fabric of space-time and kill us all! Think of the children.