Brief Crankiness About A Very Small Thing
One of the most-used bits of small business accounting software going is QuickBooks, with a market share in the mid-eighties. It's pushing Microsoft numbers, in fact, and parent company Intuit's products have trounced Microsoft's attempts at competition several times: quite a feat, considering how dirty Redmond tends to play. To be fair to them, QuickBooks is a very good program, almost a Morganesque monopoly holder. What I want to gripe about is a bit of its design - a stunningly poor bit of design.
Every computer program, from time to time, has to make the user wait. Not every task can be completed instantly or in the seconds of grace time you get before people perceive themselves as waiting. Programmers and interface designers have to keep this in mind - and they're keenly aware that no one likes non-participatory indefinite waiting. People will more contentedly settle down to wait when they feel like they initiated the waiting, when they know how long they're going to be waiting, and when the wait is expected and can be seen coming. Contrarywise, of course, waiting gets under users' skins when they're forced to wait by an event that something else initiated, when they don't know how long they'll be waiting, and when you surprise them by making them wait. This is all very well-known.
One of the easy ways that programmers and interface designers have given themselves to improve waiting situations is the progress bar. Everyone here has seen it. It's a visual representation of your wait and it tells you how long you have to wait. In good implementations, it also has two critical accessories - a label that tells you how fast things are proceeding and gives you the data to calculate how long you'll be waiting and a cancel button that gives you some control over the wait: you have at least the option of stopping the process and saying "I'm not willing to wait - let's try this some other time."
It's not a big thing, really, but a painful lesson that you learn designing interfaces (and in a lot of other areas of life) is that people remember and dwell on and hold decades-long grudges over the negatives, and it's much easier to get people's attention with negatives than with positives.
I end up using our clients' Quickbooks a fair amount during basic troubleshooting. Quickbooks has a bad habit that I hear from our clients and see for myself: it takes the simple progress-bar tool and botches its implementation so that it makes waiting more aggravating, not less. Quickbooks gives you progress bars when the program makes you wait, so you think that their interface designers are being nice to you the way you deserve since you pay oodles of money for your software. No such luck. First, Quickbooks doesn't label their progress bars at all - bad form, but not a serious problem. Second, they often don't give you a cancel button, which is a bad choice. People don't use those cancel buttons too often, but their presence is important. Taking the cancel button away is not a good interface-design move. Third, the thing that makes the problem terminal, is that Quickbooks' tasks are almost never measured by just one progress bar. You'll see a progress bar. It'll fill up. Ahah - the end of the wait approaches! Except then another progress bar starts on its merry way across the screen. That one finishes. Then there's another. Very often there's a fourth, and on into complete ridiculousness. Remember, too, that these are unlabeled progress bars and there's usually no cancel button: QuickBooks' designers are giving you no clues at all as to how long you have to wait and their choices deny you the option of canceling the progress if waiting doesn't suit you.
This is spectacularly bad design - it subverts users' expectations in a bad way, aggravates them, and takes away from their efficiency. More, it's gratuitously bad: the tools to measure progress are part of every serious programmer's toolkit and their use is a widely-accepted part of best practices. This doesn't outweigh the many excellent features of QuickBooks, but it's an example of how Intuit's near-monopoly, like Microsoft's, encourages them to sloth.
Every computer program, from time to time, has to make the user wait. Not every task can be completed instantly or in the seconds of grace time you get before people perceive themselves as waiting. Programmers and interface designers have to keep this in mind - and they're keenly aware that no one likes non-participatory indefinite waiting. People will more contentedly settle down to wait when they feel like they initiated the waiting, when they know how long they're going to be waiting, and when the wait is expected and can be seen coming. Contrarywise, of course, waiting gets under users' skins when they're forced to wait by an event that something else initiated, when they don't know how long they'll be waiting, and when you surprise them by making them wait. This is all very well-known.
One of the easy ways that programmers and interface designers have given themselves to improve waiting situations is the progress bar. Everyone here has seen it. It's a visual representation of your wait and it tells you how long you have to wait. In good implementations, it also has two critical accessories - a label that tells you how fast things are proceeding and gives you the data to calculate how long you'll be waiting and a cancel button that gives you some control over the wait: you have at least the option of stopping the process and saying "I'm not willing to wait - let's try this some other time."
It's not a big thing, really, but a painful lesson that you learn designing interfaces (and in a lot of other areas of life) is that people remember and dwell on and hold decades-long grudges over the negatives, and it's much easier to get people's attention with negatives than with positives.
I end up using our clients' Quickbooks a fair amount during basic troubleshooting. Quickbooks has a bad habit that I hear from our clients and see for myself: it takes the simple progress-bar tool and botches its implementation so that it makes waiting more aggravating, not less. Quickbooks gives you progress bars when the program makes you wait, so you think that their interface designers are being nice to you the way you deserve since you pay oodles of money for your software. No such luck. First, Quickbooks doesn't label their progress bars at all - bad form, but not a serious problem. Second, they often don't give you a cancel button, which is a bad choice. People don't use those cancel buttons too often, but their presence is important. Taking the cancel button away is not a good interface-design move. Third, the thing that makes the problem terminal, is that Quickbooks' tasks are almost never measured by just one progress bar. You'll see a progress bar. It'll fill up. Ahah - the end of the wait approaches! Except then another progress bar starts on its merry way across the screen. That one finishes. Then there's another. Very often there's a fourth, and on into complete ridiculousness. Remember, too, that these are unlabeled progress bars and there's usually no cancel button: QuickBooks' designers are giving you no clues at all as to how long you have to wait and their choices deny you the option of canceling the progress if waiting doesn't suit you.
This is spectacularly bad design - it subverts users' expectations in a bad way, aggravates them, and takes away from their efficiency. More, it's gratuitously bad: the tools to measure progress are part of every serious programmer's toolkit and their use is a widely-accepted part of best practices. This doesn't outweigh the many excellent features of QuickBooks, but it's an example of how Intuit's near-monopoly, like Microsoft's, encourages them to sloth.