I don’t know how there’s an entire industry of proprietary, bullshit, no quality control, no oversight, no competition company or industry-specific software applications. Unlike the standard commercial world of software, these apps don’t need to compete with anything and have zero motivation to do it better or to even do it right in the first place. The following three violations are most likely to give me a coronary sometime within the next few weeks:
One app designer thought it would make sense and be neat to use the Windows “critical error” sound for any and every notification the program gives you. You know what I’m talking about - that horrible “DONK!” that most of us are hard-wired to have a pavlovian anxiety response to. An average use results in between 20 to 50 of these within a 5-minute time frame, at which point I’m grinding my teeth and clenching my fists. Bonus points: disabling the computer’s audio causes the program to somehow switch over to using the PC Speaker to emit a horrible, shrill “BEEP!” instead.
Another program that’s used almost exclusively for finding and printing results inexplicably has a Printer icon that actually means “Defer” - which means that when you click it, the project you just worked on for 15 minutes disappears to some sort of “deffered” location that nobody knows how to retrieve it from. Bonus round: the actual “print” icon, right next to the icon that looks like a printer but is not “print,” appears to be praying hands (!?).
A third program - an incredibly tedious, proprietary, million-field data logging thing that enjoys disabling options like the tab key and the number pad - has a “reset entire form” option right next to the “submit” button, both of which are little boxes about 3 pixels by 3 pixels. Countless times I’ve spent 10 minutes filling out the form only to have the mouse pointer slip one half-millimeter to the right while clicking “submit” and instead clear all of the fields I just spent 10 minutes feeling out. There is absolutely no circumstance in which “clear all fields” should even be an option.
As someone who has helped design some of these POS (and I don’t mean “point of sale”) apps, I feel your pain. About the only justification I can give you is that they’re usually done under an unrealistic deadline, and interface design is often considered mere fluff (“Just get the damned thing to work, I don’t care what it looks like!”).
I will submit the online training booking system used by my recent employers. Supporting only Internet Explorer, despite being used by (among others) the Computer Science department, someone thought it would be a good idea to have a javascript browser sniffer that loaded a dialog box on every single page that warned you your browser was unsupported. Combined with the inevitably terrible design of the system itself, this meant you could expect to have to dismiss 15-20 pop-ups informing you of your browser iniquity before you were allowed to actually book. Needless to say, the vanilla html forms nature of the site meant it worked fine on pretty much any browser; apart from the warnings, of course.
Ironically, one of the courses available was “intelligent use of the web.”
Praying hands? The choice of icon sounds perversely, even sadistically, appropriate.
I feel your pain, though. Have you considered that the software is the product not of the massive group copulation of inebriated primates, but rather the work of a team of sociopaths selected expressly for their ability and desire to inflict suffering through software?
Oh, Christ. Just reading that makes me cringe. There’s nothing worse than that DONK sound, especially when it really takes you by surprise (like, an application randomly crashing with no warning.) I don’t know how the sound engineers who created that sound effect can live with themselves.
A close second, to me, is the Mac OSX “THUNK!” sound that plays when you drag and drop something from one location to another or successfully paste something that you copied. It’s the most startling, negative-sounding thing I’ve ever heard since the Windows “critical error” sound - I spent the first week with my Mac thinking it was telling me that I did something wrong.
Oh god, scientific applications are so bad for this. The other day I came across a software package that insisted that the software be installed in the root of C drive, and that the data folder be located within the application folder. Then on top of that, when you upgrade the application it DELETES the entire program folder including the data folder and settings.
My pet peeve is employers who distribute “templates” that we’re supposed to use for everything we create. Excel templates with zillions of hidden columns and strange screen divisions and whatnot. Word templates with horrid formatting all predivided into dozens of parts with a table of contents, etc.
gick.
The one really awful proprietary app I remember was some positively ANCIENT database that ran on some kind of amberscreen mouseless 2 megahertz pre-MSDOS computer older than an IBM PC, used a keyboard with oddly labeled keys, and the database itself would not let you insert or edit rows once they were entered. Spot a mistake 11 lines up and you had to nuke all subsequent lines and the line with the error and start again from that point. Type five characters, “12345” and screen would go “12” … long pause… “345”. Easy to miss a character because you would not realize it until end of line. So I got in the habit of WHOPPING the hell out of the keys to make sure each keystroke “took”, would bang out the entire damn line, then wait for the redraw to catch up and peer at it, make sure end of row lines up with previous line, then hit [del]Enter[/del] umm Line Feed or whatever the bloody key was called. Sounds like 1979 or something doesn’t it? Nope: 1998.
I had a statistical analysis program for collected data, that would not allow for correction of a typing error once the entry was submitted, and it automatically submitted when you entered a number in the last spot. Yes boss it would be nice to correct that and see what it does, but you will have to wait for an hour or more as I retype in the whole damn study and pray my finger doesn’t slip once on the last digit, because then I’ll have to start all over.
You know how that shit happens? Design by committee. A group of people who think they want something that does X, but with a little bit of Y, and don’t forget about Z, and could you squeeze some A in there, and no wait that’s wrong we need B instead of Y and your version of Z is different from ours, and why do you have X in there we never asked for that, and why isn’t C on this page that’s what the whole project is about, etc until the development team commits synchronized seppuku at the next design meeting.
I’m a software tester, and I’ve worked on stuff like this. I have marked things as bugs that I later found out were requested features. I’ve seen developers sarcastically exaggerate requests (this title needs to be bigger) in an attempt to show the client that it’s better the other way, only to have them love the change and make it permanent. I’ve seen clients demand something be done an ass-backwards inefficient way, after an efficient simple and fast way was demonstrated, because ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it’.
The reason these atrocities get used is because that’s what they accepted from the developers. They put Bob in charge cuz he used to do some BASIC on his Commodore, and Bob got dazzled by all the icons and doodads and fancy language the guys in suits were using and just nodded and smiled at all the right times during all the meetings.
Oh, god - every piece of library software is like that. The thing is, the patrons have to use the catalog interface, too! Every so often some naive ten year old asks me “How come the library catalog ain’t like Amazon?” and I have to explain “Because we have no choice but to buy it, and they can make it as bad as they want.”
We used to have a poster that said something like, “A computer programmer designs an application like the client would have requested if he had known what the hell he was talking about.”
Working as a self-employed programmer for smallish projects, I find that being strategically deaf/incomprehending helps a bit. Let the client explain a couple of times what they want exactly and why, and if it still sounds like an unbelievably bad idea, explain clearly what the pros and cons are (I know this is a BIG problem for many programmers, aside from the fact that many have only a very faint idea of what a good user interface should be). If that doesn’t help, increase the budget for implementing it. If that also doesn’t help, well, at least I’m a well paid whore
One major stumbling block is that, despite often needing it in college, too many business people don’t understand science. Well, the scientific method. They don’t collect data, don’t consider the fundamental purpose of the program, and don’t give a thought about where it fits in the grand scheme of things. They also don’t know how to develop usage requirements - that’s the thing you ought have more or less finished BEFORE talking to programmers.
In addition to the “design by committee” factor, the vast majority of programmers – and I speak as someone who knows and likes and works closely with many – usually know shit about interface design. And I don’t even mean “they don’t understand how to design a top-notch interface using all the latest understanding about human/computer interaction.” I mean that they are colorblind, never consider that CamelCase if off-putting, couldn’t design a coherent layout if their life depended on it, and rarely pose “what if” questions to think of all the different ways a user MIGHT use the product other than the monolithic best-case, do-not-pass-go scenarios they envisioned at the beginning. A lot of software products, especially niche ones, are designed by programmers, period. They do not have an interface expert on staff. (And I don’t mean a graphic artist, I mean an interface expert.) Even in larger companies, they are considered nice-to-have-but-not-really-necessary-fluff. I work for the IT dept of a major university medical center, and in the 400+ people employed in our department, in which we not only purchase and deploy vendor software but write and market some of our own, we don’t have a single interface design specialist. Not one. And we are a “most wired” award-winning medical center.
I’ve done my time in the custom programming trenches and while the design by committee analogy is basically accurate, I finally concluded that it is usually more of a build a [DEL]house[/DEL] mansion using a child’s crayon drawing for a blueprint. And the little bastard adds something new every night.
heh… this is how I got my start as an amateur database designer. Must have been around 1997 or 1998. I’m working for a company that is doing national property audits of a Federal agency. It’s the second year I’m on the team, and as we’re sitting around in one of the early meetings, a few folks start bitching about the software. I pipe up that it’s extraordinarily frustrating because it’s written as an Access database, and all they need to do is X, Y, and Z to fix this, or have it do A, B, and C to make that easier. Oh, and while we’re at it, wouldn’t it be really nice if it did 1, 2, and 3 in the field, making blah blah blah blah… At the end of the mini-rant, everyone had quieted down a bit, heads were turned towards me with this sense of expectation, and suddenly the task was mine.
Great experience. I’d monkeyed with it before, but never to the level of assuring things were in the right form, etc. Pushed me forward in the company (got to run the project a couple years later) and opened a lot of doors in the future.
Really? As a comp sci major I’ve encountered a baffling number of people who obsess over every single minutiae, including the interface organization, how people would look for stuff, and whether a person who isn’t interested in your sorting algorithm would like it or not. You can have a conversation on a project for leisure that boils down to (punctuation omitted for effect):
Deep breath
“Okay this interface isn’t working out I think we should switch those two buttons oh and this one isn’t descriptive enough and this one should really come before this one and that one looks kind of ugly hey Kim your boyfriend is a graphic artist right can you get him to make us a new icon pleaseandthanks and this menu option should really be in this dropdown I think most people would look there first you don’t do you I think we should ask all our friends and post on all the message boards we can find on where they’d look for that option first and get back to this debate after we have data and this screen looks ugly would you use it I wouldn’t.”
Granted, Computer Scientists and programmers aren’t necessarily the same thing. We’ve also had it pounded into our heads by various people that even though you should prioritize base functionality (does it sort the database well?) you should never neglect interface, both in terms of aesthetic (aesthetic =/= flashy) and usability/organization. It’s been reduced to meme-like form in “if it looks like shit, and finding stuff is shit, it is shit.” And frequently are made to ask ourselves, “would you use it?”
Oh. You’re still in school. It explains a lot, like your enthusiasm to do a good job instead of stopping the boss from yelling at you. Unfortunately, you have to have been in the business for quite a while, and known the CEO since he was a blowhard salesman selling the Impossible Dream rather than what the company could really do, and pulling his ass out of the fire before the then-CEO caught wind of it, before you can say, with any hope of not being laughed out of the company, “Dude, do you want it done or do you want it done RIGHT?” He’ll say, “Both,” but will assemble (dissemble) a lie for the customer why Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Until that day, especially if there are layers of authority between you and whoever has to [del]admit his quoted date was pulled out of his ass[/del] lie, you’re screwed and will need to, at the same time, tout that project on your resume as a great success and remember the little time-consumers that put you behind on a completely arbitrary schedule.
