Wednesday, June 07, 2006
UI complaints (is it just making mountains out of a molehill)
One major area of constant complaining and feedback is the amazing counter-intuitive user interface that was created for the administrators of the system i'm handling.
The immediate retort: you can live with it! You're just making mountains out of molehills!
Sad to say, that's probably what's going to happen eventually.
How I hope I can get a open list of User Interface (UI) feedback on the admin tool, the way that Chris did for Vista and Óutlook.
I actually forwarded the first Vista list to my immediate team, as well as Scoble's comments about Chris's feedback, especially the paragraph where he said "public discussion increases the chances that the issues will be fixed....). Some members of my team thanked me for these links, and acknowledged the value in transparancy in even just a basic design discussion with our technology partner group.
In a project, there's always costs/resources/schedule decisions that needs to be made. I sure dont deny that it is the case for the system that i'm handling. Some of the UI issues come as a result of code resused from other projects, probably for tools that do not have a up-to-the-minute dependency by the company though.
My biggest "molehill" is, and imagine this if you can, you're using a browser like IE7/Firefox, and you're in the middle of a long page, and when you do a refresh, the data gets refreshed but the view is still around the same area. In my tool, you'll never know what view you'll get after a refresh. It can go to the top, the bottom, and anywhere in between!
Some geniuses actually said that this is good. Of course it's good, when you know you're going to use it in a test environment for a few weeks and that's it. It's irritating to say the least, when you have customers complaining, and you get this amazingly intuitive UI that moves user accessibility back into the really dark ages of Windows 3.1 (perhaps even DOS!!).
Cant recall which other technology blog that i've read, but if we are seeing so much questions raised about the things that can be seen, you sure don't want to know what's going on underneath it!
The immediate retort: you can live with it! You're just making mountains out of molehills!
Sad to say, that's probably what's going to happen eventually.
How I hope I can get a open list of User Interface (UI) feedback on the admin tool, the way that Chris did for Vista and Óutlook.
I actually forwarded the first Vista list to my immediate team, as well as Scoble's comments about Chris's feedback, especially the paragraph where he said "public discussion increases the chances that the issues will be fixed....). Some members of my team thanked me for these links, and acknowledged the value in transparancy in even just a basic design discussion with our technology partner group.
In a project, there's always costs/resources/schedule decisions that needs to be made. I sure dont deny that it is the case for the system that i'm handling. Some of the UI issues come as a result of code resused from other projects, probably for tools that do not have a up-to-the-minute dependency by the company though.
My biggest "molehill" is, and imagine this if you can, you're using a browser like IE7/Firefox, and you're in the middle of a long page, and when you do a refresh, the data gets refreshed but the view is still around the same area. In my tool, you'll never know what view you'll get after a refresh. It can go to the top, the bottom, and anywhere in between!
Some geniuses actually said that this is good. Of course it's good, when you know you're going to use it in a test environment for a few weeks and that's it. It's irritating to say the least, when you have customers complaining, and you get this amazingly intuitive UI that moves user accessibility back into the really dark ages of Windows 3.1 (perhaps even DOS!!).
Cant recall which other technology blog that i've read, but if we are seeing so much questions raised about the things that can be seen, you sure don't want to know what's going on underneath it!
