I’ve been a Metafilter reader for several years now. I skim the most recent posts at least once every few days, almost always coming across something amazingly interesting, funny, or inspiring. I could go on about Metafilter, but won’t.
Anyway, today I found this gem:
User interface design so epically bad you need a strategy guide to defeat it. Presenting The Legend of FacilityFocus.
“Every week, a certain number of us need to report a leaking faucet or a faulty light switch or a broken window. We used to do this by calling the people in the facility operations center, or by interacting with a web application that basically just sent an email to one of the same people, who would interact with the back-end systems to get the needed work taken care of.
But now, we’re asking everyone to enter their (non-emergency) work requests via the web interface to FacilityFocus. And that web interface is a wonderful example of what can go wrong when a designer fails to heed Geoff’s advice to “put yourself in the place of a person who did not work with the developers of the operating system, someone who sees your dialog box without the benefit of any prior experience with the way you conceptualize things, and … ask yourself whether they would understand what to do”.
“A few days ago, I got my first look at FacilityFocus. In a couple of weeks, thousands of undergraduates are going to start trying to use it. And when they run aground, as many of them probably will, they’re going to complain to (people who will complain to) me. So I’ve written an underground guide, “The Legend of FacilityFocus“, which uses the metaphor of beating a fantasy adventure game like The Legend of Zelda, and offers tips and tricks to make it to the final screen. If you want to know what I think (some of) the problems of the Maximus interface are, read the guide and you’ll get the idea.”
This comment from the metafilter thread is, fitting:
There seems to be an entire class of software vendors that supply products that allegedly meet the needs of education and other institutional clients (healthcare, military, etc.). These vendors produce ridiculously expensive and unusable crap- the sort of stuff that is bought by committees composed of upper echelon management types who will never need to deploy or try to use the garbage they’re spending vast amounts of other people’s money on. Software solutions too unfriendly, unstable, and incompatible to last a minute in the universe of competitive business.
August 20th, 2007 at 2:03 am
[...] some slightly dodgy user interfaces in my time as a web developer but College Web Guy recently posted a link to a story about an application at Penn University that takes usability and design to a whole new [...]
August 20th, 2007 at 4:05 am
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I haven’t had such a laugh in weeks.
But don’t blame the developers, blame the sponsors of the project!
August 20th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
As someone who’s going through the pain of a new student information system implementation right now, this couldn’t have come at a better time. That last paragraph is just pure gold.
As for who to blame? I prefer the shotgun approach: the developers, product marketers, project sponsors, selection committees and implementation teams all play a critical role in ensuring that even the simplest online request becomes a complex multi-step process that requires four calls to the helpline.
September 18th, 2008 at 8:46 am
[...] Those Lovable Unusable Campus Apps - “Software solutions too unfriendly, unstable, and incompatible to last a minute in the universe of competitive business”. [...]