Seth Godin offers a parable about toasters and web sites:
We recently acquired what might be the worst toaster in the history of the world. It’s pretty fancy and shiny and microprocessor controlled. And it makes toast.
But here’s what I have to do to use it:
[list of 10 steps]
He goes on to draw a parallel between the excessive demands of his toaster and paying a $6 bill to EBay, which requires 11 clicks.
My response: Yes, YES, YES!!! What he said!!
There are more examples of this than I can count, starting with the dreadful interface of the new Microsoft Office. The academic “content management system” Blackboard is the current bane of my online existence. It requires at least three clicks for even the simplest operation– to change a student’s grade on an assignment, I have to click from the gradebook to a “change grades” page, then click into the right text box to change the grade, then click “OK” at which point I am taken to an otherwise blank page saying “Grade successfully changed.” Thanks so much. I wouldn’t’ve been able to figure that out without a whole new page to inform me of it.
I don’t want to hone my mouse-clicking skills, I want to make toast grade my assignments. Streamline the process, and get the software out of my way.
As a TA this year I second the complaints about blackboard/chalk. I would extend the complaints to include general usability issues. For example in the grade book box to enter the grade is as physically far from the name as it can. In between there is the users email address, id number, date entered (which matters because if anyone else has entered grades this is a really wide column), current grade, and maybe one more. All of that information is useful, however it makes it very difficult to make sure you are entering the grades on the right lines. (although this may be a local variant issue)
Jeez Chad, I’ve been ranting about how stupid putting computer controls in everything just because we can is for years now. You’ve been there. Is it a shock to you that making a toaster a computerized device didn’t improve it?
I am a professional systems admin, and I refuse to buy an appliance that has a computer driven interface where a simple and easy to use mechanical one is available.
It’s not because I CAN’T make it work. It’s because I REFUSE to put myself through the pain of it. Masochists are mental defectives.
As someone who has encountered quite a few examples of bad software, let me say: Amen, brother.
The most gratuitous example I have encountered is the backup software that came with the external hard drive I bought about a year ago. Of course, the point of backup software is that you want a backup copy of every file (possibly excepting certain specified files or folders). There is an easy way to do this that comes with every OS I have ever encountered (Mac, Windows, and *nix): use a copy command (from the command line, or drag and drop) to copy over the top level directory/folder and everything below it. The geniuses who concocted this backup software had a different idea: By default back up only certain file types, and let the user add others. Which means that for every file type I have which is not on the default list I have to manually add it. Needless to say, the default list does not include any file type associated with LaTeX, nor does it cover preferences (which are only one of the most important things to back up).
As for tax preparation software, let me just say this: If for any reason you need to pay estimated tax, do not use H&R Block Tax Cut. I ended up doing those calculations by hand.
Re: tax software
I used Tax Cut once. Once. I had so many problems with it (in 2001), but the worst was when I got to the end and tried to e-file. It told me I had to go back and round all of my entries to the nearest dollar. (Why couldn’t they do this automatically?). The kicker was that after every individual change, for some reason I had to save the form, exit, restart, change another entry, save, exit, restart, for the many 10’s of entries…
Second to this was that every question like “are you a farmer?” (no, skip) was followed by several more questions as though I’d said “yes” (how much farm equipment do you have? any subsidies? Do pigs really like mud?).
Turbo Tax ain’t perfect, but I’ve been pleased overall, if there’s anything about doing taxes that is pleasing.
It’s so true.
Only today I caved and decided to put my To Do list into Lotus Notes, since I am stuck with Lotus Notes at work for the foreseeable future. And I have learned to work with its infuriating quirks in the mail and calendar functions, so I thought, how bad can it be?
About an hour and a half into the process, enraged, I started looking for online widgets that would do what I actually wanted and not make me use 8 clicks just to delete a recurring task (not counting the innumerable clicks I had to make to find out that was even possible). Fortunately there are several out there.
Not many geographers posting or ESRI’s ArcGIS would have been mentioned. The product does what it is supposed to do, and usually without to many user prompts. However, finding the command to accomplish the task requires such intimate knowledge of the software that it’s unusable by the casual user. Furthermore, their (ESRI) constant revisions with no concern for backward compatibility makes life difficult at best.
Writing usable software takes enormous effort, time, and money. In the marketplace, companies that make that effort don’t do well when people making the buying decisions only look at price, which is easy when folks choosing the software don’t have to actually use it. It often seems like such systems are designed to be only as good as they need to be to be just below the pain threshold at which the user gives up. So I’m curious, is Blackboard so entrenched no one is in a position to say “This wastes too much of my time” and stop using it?
Ron,
At least one university is phasing out Blackboard and phasing in Moodle. I don’t know if Moodle is any easier to use than Blackboard, but it appears to be more cost effective for small institutions.
The reason Content Management Systems and Learning Management Systems and the like are so awful is that they are “enterprise”-grade software, sold to organizations, not people. It is a huge big deal to install them, and typically the people who are going to use the tool have almost no input about what you end up getting. Once the tool is in place, it takes an army of consultants and thousands (if not millions) of dollars to upgrade and customize further. Ripping the whole system out and replacing it with something else is out of the question. You’re stuck with what you get.
Contrast these giant systems with consumer grade software that costs $100, or $40, or $0. The vast majority of this software sucks just as bad as the enterprise stuff, but the users can actually afford to throw the software away and start over. So there are always a few actual good titles out there.
In new millenium, technology makes _you_ toast.
Cheers.
While the author’s complaints about the new version of Word are sensible, those about Blackboard are unfounded. Three clicks to complete a task is not very many. Using any kind of website is going to require a certain number of clicks to achieve a given task. And seeing as grading is just one facet of Blackboard, there is no reason that the software’s authors should create a separate “change grades” page any more than they should create separate pages for every single task the system is capable of (an “edit syllabus” page, or a “post announcement” page). Besides, how often do you need to change grades? If you want fewer overall clicks in your grading scheme, just keep an Excel file of grades, change them to your heart’s content, and then upload the file to Blackboard. The level of annoyance of this aspect of Blackboard is nowhere near the idiocy which is Microsoft Word (or, as the OP refers to, eBay’s billing system).