More Software Frustrations

Here's a few software things that have bugged me lately:

I'm currently reading Why Software Sucks by David Platt. He praises how Google senses the country you are connecting from and uses the language of that country e.g. Spanish in Mexico. The problem is, it does this even if I am logged in to my account. Just because I am in another country doesn't mean I've changed my language. It's possible to get back to English but it's annoying nonetheless.

Next, I'm on my bank web site paying some bills (a feature I do appreciate). A message shows up telling me I can now receive one of my bills electronically, rather than having it mailed to me. Great! I click on the link and get presented with a blank form, without the name of the company filled in, forcing me to pick it from a huge list. (Most of the list is not applicable, e.g. for other provinces.) Next there is a "Name" field - who's name? mine? but surely it knows my name? or the company name? but I just picked it from a list? I leave it blank and continue - it doesn't complain so I'm still not sure what it wanted. Next it tells me I have to sign up for an ePost account. It's free, but it's annoying to have to sign up for yet another on-line account and come up with yet another password. Can't the company send bills to my bank without every account holder having to sign up for ePost?

But the best is yet to come. I get through the ePost signup, only to be told that I have to contact the company personally, by phone, before I can complete the process. Yeah, right. I pay bills on the evenings and weekends, so I have to wait till business hours to phone. Then I can look forward to the "pleasure" of an automated phone system and being on hold forever. Then I'll likely talk to some poor customer service person who has never heard of sending bills electronically. No thanks. And they wonder why so many on line transactions are abandoned part way through.

The next incident was minor, but it's a good example of a GUI blooper. I was ordering books through Lulu (copies of Getting Real for my programmers). I'm entering my address and I get to the field for "State/Province". Except there are no provinces. That wouldn't surprise me except that for the prompt. I skip it and move to the next field, "Country", and enter Canada. The screen jumps around a little bit. Hmmm... sure enough, State/Province now lists provinces. This is a good trick, some programmer obviously applied some Javascript. But they didn't consider that people generally enter fields in order, pretty much guaranteeing that Canadian customers will be frustrated. And most people wouldn't notice the slight screen jump and figure out that they could go back to a previous field and it would now magically let them do what it wouldn't just a minute ago.

We run into this issue in our own software. The rule of thumb is that if a field "depends" on another field it should be "after" it in the normal entry order. Usually this can be handled simply by changing the order of the fields. But in this case, it seems "wrong" to put Country before State/Province. My suggestion would be to remove the fancy Javascript - just have a combined list. The programmer can apply their Javascript by filling in the country based on the State/Province choice.

We use Snagit for our screenshots. It's a good program. But it has one really annoying "feature". Quite frequently, when I start it up, it pops up a dialog saying "You have the most recent version of Snagit". I always have to read this a couple of times because the normal expectation is that it would pop up to tell you there's a newer version.

I haven't quite figured out the logic behind this one. Why do I need to be told I have the latest version? I don't think it comes up every time, so maybe it only comes up after it does a periodic check for a new version. (Of course, I only use it periodically, so it happens more often than not.) It may just be that the programmer thought that since they'd gone to all the work of checking for a new version there should be some recognition of this. Programmers are often strangely reluctant to just have the program quietly do it's stuff. Maybe we need pop up blockers for more than just our web browsers.

There is a link on the dialog to the release notes. So perhaps the purpose of the pop up is to give you a chance to read the release notes. But surely if that was the purpose it would only pop up once after installing a new version. How many times (if any) do I want to read the release notes?

Enough being critical, I'd better go and try to do better myself. It's always easier to criticize. (Why Software Sucks does actually suggest solutions or at least, better alternatives, to most of the things it complains about.)