03-18-2019, 08:57 PM
(03-18-2019, 07:10 PM)ijmorlan Wrote:(03-18-2019, 04:19 PM)robdrimmie Wrote: There are all kinds of systematic reasons presenting the information in a manner that is useful to the end user is hard, and it all makes sense. That doesn't mean that it's a good solution, just that it's the least amount of effort possible to solve a problem, which is a reasonable way to describe my complaint with every piece of software developed by eSolutions. They are incentivized to do the bare minimum (because they are an agency, and because the Region only has so much money to put into these products).
It's easy to understand why an implementation is poor, but that doesn't invalidate criticisms of that implementation, nor does it really justify the poor implementation. The follow-on costs of supporting this tool's bad interface are going to exceed the cost of improving the experience by even a moderate amount, but the latter costs more today and therefore the latter will be someone else's headache.
Well said. Based on the sample account statement posted to an earlier posting in this thread, I am not impressed. In addition to the issues mentioned by people, it appears that many transactions (as understood by anybody using the system) are listed twice in the transaction listing.
One of the challenges that often arises in computer systems is displaying information in a meaningful way. Just because a direct dump of the database contents is not meaningful to users does not mean they are wrong. In this case the transaction listing gets a big fail from me.
And that is my (partial) professional opinion.
With more information and time, I could give a more complete opinion which would include suggested fixes and perhaps hints as to how the poor interface came about. But there is no new information other than “the transaction listing was faked” which could reverse my judgement that the interface is bad. I don’t have to know why it is that way or what challenges may exist to know it’s bad.
And by the way, the Region, and every organization of any significant size, should have its own programming staff. Not for absolutely everything, obviously, but to create small and medium scale systems that connect together everything else and cover gaps in other systems. Every organization is an IT organization now. Suggesting that they shouldn’t have programmers is like, and really almost the same thing as, suggesting that they shouldn’t have managers but instead contract out all management activity. In short, utterly insane.
the system often processes multiple actions on the card during a card tap. I personally think they should do a summary of those actions with an expander to see more details like the individual actions that occurred at that specific timestamp.