I have seen computer hell

Everything else
1

I worked as an office assistant this summer for the Swedish social insurance agency (försäkringskassan) and I was called on for some extra help today. Due to some problems with my security card I could not do the work as planned so I was subjected to a lesson on how to make people hate computers. I had to work with a database software where you could only search one folder at a time. With no root folder. You could’nt move more than one file at a time inbetween folders. The menus were so counterintuitive it took me fifteen minutes of guided instruction before I could properly open a file and then print it. And that’s just what I experienced from one day’s use. I pity the people who have to deal with this piece of crap on a daily basis.

I’ve been using computers since I was seven, it comes pretty naturally to me. I’ve always thought that people who complain about computers being hard to understand and hard to work with were just outdated and too used to working without them. Not anymore. Had today been my introduction to computers I think I would have been turned away never to look back.

How can people write software like this? I mean honestly? The reason I was called in to work today was because the entire office was there to do overtime because this piece of software was such a pain to use.

2

Good user interfaces are a pain to write. It’s just so much simpler to offer only a single primitive action bound to a hotkey than creating a dialog with a dozen options, or keeping track of complex selection states. Custom-written software always has much more primitive user interfaces than MS Office or Windows Explorer. Low-budget wargames written by developers who date back to the DOS days are also notorious for this. Most people just don’t realize how much work Microsoft put into their UI because they’ve never used anything else, and never tried to write a good UI on their own.

3

I’ve noticed this lately with PC games. I’ve been playing Freedom Force, and like most games it has its own custom interface for basic stuff like saving & loading games. It looks fine and is fairly intuitive, but it’s missing lots of handy stuff you get for free with the standard Windows gizmos - like hotkeys and default buttons. It’s a bit of a pain, but I also know completely mimicking all of the MS Windows UI conventions is a lot of work.