Do we need to make the user-interface look good (adding images, animations, etc.) for a program internal only to the company?
Making the user-interface look good might slow the performance of the software, slow the development process, add maintenance cost, and slow the user process, but it also might encourage developers/ux to perform better, encourage the users to perform better.
Will it be all right if the UI was like designed by a preschooler, or should we make the UI grande? Is there any UX cost-benefit analysis about this matter?
Answer
There isn't any difference between internal products and products for customers because everything is used by real people.
Sure, some executives will think that they can cut a corner here & there on design of internal products. Unfortunately, they're forgetting that a second lost here and a second lost there as a result of a poorly-designed software workflow will add up to minutes/hours/days/weeks/months of lost productivity over the long term, which means higher cost than an extra day or even an extra week of development.
At the same time, a well-designed interface doesn't mean "fancy" images & animations. In fact, those can be very much distracting or slow down the software, neither of which is good.
Thus, just like the design efforts for customer products, the design efforts for internal software should be focused on making clean interfaces that follow the natural workflows and where nothing can be removed to simplify them.
Added
Google Research team has conducted a study of how aesthetics affect the perception of usability. The findings were predictable:
The results showed that the beauty of the interface did not affect how users perceived the usability of the shops: Participants (or Users) were capable of distinguishing if a product was usable or not, no matter how nice it looked.
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