![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plonqSubject line of this post comes from a book of exquisitely bad poetry I was forced to read in school. The title was, by far, the best part of the book.
The topic of this post is incompetence, and the frustration of end-users in dealing with that incompetence. My boss has passed along an edict from his boss that all of us must have our personal development profiles filled out by the end of the month, for review in September. The purpose of this document is to give our managers a profile of our education, competencies and aspirations. I remember that I got frustrated by this thing the last time I worked on it, but I couldn't recall any of the specifics.
It all came back to me today when I tried to fill in the section on my education. If this part of the document was free-form there would not be a problem, but they limit your choices to only those institutions and programs on a table of "valid" choices. If you didn't attend one of those colleges, you are not educated. Fortunately I attended one of those colleges, but...
They want to know 1) Institution, 2) Program, 3) Level (e.g., BA, MA, PhD, etc.), 4) If you completed the program, and 5) Year of graduation.
Bear in mind that I committed the unpardonable sin of dropping out of university, thus the years I spent there count for nothing. On the other hand, this form has a check box where you can indicate whether or not you completed the program, so perhaps they are granting partial credit. I filled out the first thee fields and left 4 and 5 blank, since I neither completed the program, nor graduated (each of which implies the other, yes?).
I clicked "Save", and it kicked back with an error requester telling me that the graduation year was a required field. Meh. Okay. I filled that in with the last year for which I attended and clicked "Save" again. This time it complained that if I fill in a graduation year, I cannot leave the "Completed" button unchecked.
But wait -- if I check that field and fill in a graduation year, that means that I'm claiming to have completed the course and graduated in that year. I didn't complete the course - I dropped out after a couple of years. I got distracted by a phone call, and when I returned to the form a few minutes later, the system had apparently timed out. My first clue to this was when the "Save" button and "Cancel" buttons simply stopped doing anything. I clicked a couple more buttons on the form with no effect, and then finally clicked on "Delete" so that I could come back to this section later. That's when it gave me the following goofy requester:
Why is it prompting me for a "Yes/No" answer? If I select "No" does that take us into the ugly realm of double-negatives? In the end, I selected both options. One simply made the requester go away (but I managed to summon it again by hitting "Delete"). The other immediately spawned a second error message that politely informed me that I had taken too long filling out the form, and that all my work was for naught. Very sorry that you lost all your information, but you should learn to type faster.
...
I'm going to keep this example around for future coding, since it was probably produced by people with much more edumacation than I have. I'll try to make my applications work more like this one.
The topic of this post is incompetence, and the frustration of end-users in dealing with that incompetence. My boss has passed along an edict from his boss that all of us must have our personal development profiles filled out by the end of the month, for review in September. The purpose of this document is to give our managers a profile of our education, competencies and aspirations. I remember that I got frustrated by this thing the last time I worked on it, but I couldn't recall any of the specifics.
It all came back to me today when I tried to fill in the section on my education. If this part of the document was free-form there would not be a problem, but they limit your choices to only those institutions and programs on a table of "valid" choices. If you didn't attend one of those colleges, you are not educated. Fortunately I attended one of those colleges, but...
They want to know 1) Institution, 2) Program, 3) Level (e.g., BA, MA, PhD, etc.), 4) If you completed the program, and 5) Year of graduation.
Bear in mind that I committed the unpardonable sin of dropping out of university, thus the years I spent there count for nothing. On the other hand, this form has a check box where you can indicate whether or not you completed the program, so perhaps they are granting partial credit. I filled out the first thee fields and left 4 and 5 blank, since I neither completed the program, nor graduated (each of which implies the other, yes?).
I clicked "Save", and it kicked back with an error requester telling me that the graduation year was a required field. Meh. Okay. I filled that in with the last year for which I attended and clicked "Save" again. This time it complained that if I fill in a graduation year, I cannot leave the "Completed" button unchecked.
But wait -- if I check that field and fill in a graduation year, that means that I'm claiming to have completed the course and graduated in that year. I didn't complete the course - I dropped out after a couple of years. I got distracted by a phone call, and when I returned to the form a few minutes later, the system had apparently timed out. My first clue to this was when the "Save" button and "Cancel" buttons simply stopped doing anything. I clicked a couple more buttons on the form with no effect, and then finally clicked on "Delete" so that I could come back to this section later. That's when it gave me the following goofy requester:
Why is it prompting me for a "Yes/No" answer? If I select "No" does that take us into the ugly realm of double-negatives? In the end, I selected both options. One simply made the requester go away (but I managed to summon it again by hitting "Delete"). The other immediately spawned a second error message that politely informed me that I had taken too long filling out the form, and that all my work was for naught. Very sorry that you lost all your information, but you should learn to type faster.
...
I'm going to keep this example around for future coding, since it was probably produced by people with much more edumacation than I have. I'll try to make my applications work more like this one.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-08-31 05:33 pm (UTC)Perhaps coded by the owner's son/grandson?
I have to disagree
Date: 2006-08-31 07:32 pm (UTC)I don't remember any other poem in the book (in fact, I seem to recall thinking most other than the title poem were pretty indifferent when I had to read it in seventh grade) but that one is good.
:P
no subject
Date: 2006-09-01 03:17 pm (UTC)