Vienna You’ve Ruined My Day

I spent several years as a usability engineer and in one session with a defense contractor, testing a complete rewrite of a big enterprise app that wasn’t going well, a participant told me that our products ruined her day. She dreaded her workday because she knew she had to come in and use our stuff. Ouch. That’s the nature of usability, of putting the user first. Somedays you get praise and hugs and somedays, well, somedays you realize how important it is to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and walk around a bit. That product ruined her day because it worked fine functionally but the developers had never walked in her shoes, had never lived the life of a procurement specialist or supply-chain manager or dock foreman.

So while no one came and sat in my cube this week I’ll send Vienna feedback the only way I know how, by writing this. Vienna, if you’re listening, YOU RUIN MY DAY. I love your app, it’s free and easy and no-longer crashes incessantly. It has just what I need in a feed reader, but it lacks one crucial thing: empathy for it’s user. You’ve failed to walk in my shoes.

Exhibit A

This is the toolbar, under that damn gear icon is a host of features. Unfortunately they only exist in that menu, I can’t break them out as individual buttons. That means marking an entire feed “as read” requires click+drag+select+unclick every single time. It should just be *click* and done. Seriously this is an awful, awful bit if UI undesign trotted out as an enhancement. One of the downfalls of open-source is that criticizing an unpaid developer feels a little dirty, but it’s the truth. No one ever hesitated to tell me about issues with the interfaces I’ve designed, I guess it’s only fair I do the same.