RSS feedMac OS X Leopard: Designer’s Guide to Icons
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I had the amusing experience of connecting my iPhone to a Windows box today. Windows is so user friendly that it prompted me for which iPhone application it should run.
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Effective Keyword Use as an SEO Ranking Factor – The Most Important SEO Factors
“Having done the research and analysis, here are the most important SEO factors, from the highest priority to the lowest.”
This is just a mini rant about MYOB. I hate MYOB. I hate it with a passion.
I remember seeing a demo of the original version of MYOB back in the late 1980s at the Apple Users’ Group in Sydney. I remember clearly the guy saying that he’d written it himself, although a quick refresher course on Wikipedia seems to suggest otherwise. Being a hard core Apple IIer at the time, my mates and I thought strange name, but its still Mac shit as we rather affectionately called it.
I didn’t realise that 20 years later I’d be using it myself. My first mistake was actually choosing MYOB to do my accounts. I was thinking that its been around a long time, so its probably the Microsoft Word of the accounting world. Wrong. My second mistake was buying the Windows version, assuming that the Windows version would be better than the Mac version, due to how many Windows MYOB users are out there. Wrong again.
MYOB has been around for around 20 years now, yet the user interface (of the Windows version) is almost unusable. I’ve been struggling with it for four years now, and every six months when an update comes out I think to myself “ahh, this will be the update where they refactor the UI”.
For those who don’t use MYOB, here’s a few of the stupid braindead things that it does. The developers should be ashamed of themselves letting a bad quality interface like this out the door.
- You cannot open more than one transaction at a time. I can’t remember invoice details off the top of my head, so I just copy the information from the previous invoice. Things like the item title, the purchase order number, and regular monthly invoice totals that never change. In MYOB you cannot open an old one and edit a new one at the same time. It’s impossible. You have to open the old one, write the details down on paper, then close that and create a new transaction, and hand enter what’s written on the paper. Unbelievable. There is absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t be able to do this.
- Window content in many windows is fixed size with scroll bars. If you make the window larger, the scrolling pane inside the window stays the same size. So you end up with a scrolling list and hundreds of pixel of blank padding between it and the window edge. Why allow me to resize it if its not going to make any difference. There’s absolutely no reaon why the window shouldn’t resize its content. That’s what a window is for!
- If you’re creating a transaction and you click on account number cell, the first cell you edit in a new transaction, then it will not let you leave that cell unless you enter a valid account number. You cannot hit Esc to exit, Delete to clear it and exit or anything else. You have to enter a valid dashed account number to get past it, and this gives you a new line in your transaction which you don’t want. Hitting tab at the end of an item line also starts a new item and puts the cursor in the account number cell, causing the same problem when all you did is accidentally tab off the end of a line. And once the new unwanted entry is created, the only way to delete it is to erase the entire transaction.
- Key presses seem to be randomly assigned across the application. Its as if different people wrote different parts of the interface, and they all had their own master interaction style guide, which was different to anyone elses.
- Finding anything is impossible. There are so many menus which give no indication of whats inside them, and finding a particular function is very difficult when there could arguably be a half dozen different menu items where it might be hiding.
- The BAS tool is just plain buggy. It runs outside of MYOB, which is braindead considering it is the only really mandatory accounting task for every Australian business. Once you’ve entered your data, you can save it, but it only saves some information. It doesn’t save your name, phone number and business name for example, things that don’t change from BAS to BAS. So if you open up the current BAS from the saved version, it won’t print or validate, because your name and phone number, of all things, are missing!
I’ve had it, I really have. I understand its a Windows application, so my expectations are already pretty low, but they don’t even meet that. I understand that Windows developer are on the whole pretty stupid and ignorant, and that Windows developers can get away with not knowing what interaction design is. But if their millions of Windows users aren’t complaining about their shit UI, then surely their test team complain every time they have to jump through hooops just to enter test data for each release?
Using MYOB is like pulling teeth. Every month I sit down and wrestle with something that hasn’t even been designed properly for its primary audience: small businesses who need to do their accounts, quickly and easily, so they can get on any do things they do better, like building their business and satisfying their customers. The most basic requirement of MYOB I would have thought, aside from it actually doing accounts. And after 20 years, these idiots still can’t get it right.
I need to change, but I don’t know what to change to. I’d prefer a Mac app, which is what I should have done from the start, but are there any good ones for Australian accounting standards?
Today I joined a most prestigious club, Ticketmaster haters who have also been fucked over by them. You can read more about Ticketmaster’s monopolistic practices on Wikipedia.
I rarely go to big concert events/shows. I’m not into mainstream entertainment, and large venues aren’t the best way to enjoy a performance. But once in a while, an artist visits us who for whatever reason can only do those big venues.
And so it was that yesterday I found out that French & Saunders, whose show I loved back in the 80s, were coming to Sydney at last to play the Capital Theatre, and as a farewell tour.
Worried that I’d only just found out, I went to the Capital Theatre web site (which subsequently tells you that it is designed for Internet Explorer 5, like who uses that these days?). Amazed that web sites still use “Enter site” links, I clicked and ended up on their internal home page. Strangely enough, there’s no link to buy tickets, weird considering that this is their core business.
So I click on the Shows menu link, and suddenly a second level menu appears for every menu item, in really small type. Reading through all the menu items, none of them mention purchasing tickets. The Shows menu strangely has two second level links Current show and Previous shows, as if for some reason people visiting their site would be more interested in shows that are no longer on, than ones that are coming up.
Under the Box office menu, there’s a Booking details link, so I click on that and are presented with information about the box office, such as when it is open, special needs information and a quite large and useless photo. At the bottom, finally, is a section titled Ticket sales, and then a link to the Ticketmaster site.
Before heading over to Ticketmaster, I notice that the Links links at the bottom of the page, is just a page anchor link to… the line above it, which is… a link to their disclaimer and privacy statement. Brain dead.
So on to Ticketmaster, who you would presume are in the business of selling tickets, and thus their primary concern would be the happiness of their customers for potential return business. Their monopolistic practices may well compensate for the fact that they don’t really care after all.
The first thing you notice about the Ticketmaster web site, is that there’s no phone number on the home page. Their business is selling tickets, so we can assume that what they’re hoping to do is push people towards web purchasing, so they bring their bricks and motar costs down. Problem is, most people would like to speak to a person in order to get the seats they prefer. Everyone is different, and an automated system is never going to be able to suggest the best seats for everyone, instead everyone gets the seats that they aren’t perfectly happy with.
Without continuing the long narrative, basically you have to click on the Help menu item. Then a page of about 30 links appears. Under Ordering Tickets, you click on Ticket FAQ’s, which gives you a long scrollable page of FAQ questions. Right at the bottom, under a heading unhelpfully titled Contact Centre, is the text “Find your local Contact Centre number to order by telephone”. So click on the Contact Centre link, and a page of Order by Phone information is displayed. The first phone number listed is General Events/Enquires, and that’s the phone number to call. You’d think customers would be happier if the number was on the home page and titled Buy tickets by phone.
Once you navigate the phone menus, for French & Saunders there’s a choice between Premiere seating, Reserve A seating, and Reserve B seating. In this case they’d actually got the costs for each around the wrong way, with Premiere seating as the cheapest, and Reserve B the most expensive. If of course you knew what each kind of seating was. The phone menus don’t tell you, the web site booking doesn’t, and the Capitol Theatre doesn’t. Here’s some news for you Ticketmaster, we don’t all work in the ticketing industry, so how about explaining some of these obscure terms to us?
The next problem, after hanging up because the phone pricing was all wrong, was that most of the shows had already been sold out. Not because they’d been on sale for a while, but because Ticketmaster have this great facility whereby Mastercard subscribers are given two weeks free run at tickets before anyone else. Remember that Ticketmaster is supposed to be providing customers with the tickets they want. Instead, they’re giving people who read their latest Mastercard junk mailout and thought to themselves “Dawn French, wasn’t she in Vicar of Dibley?” all the good seats. And then anyone who is s member of the My Ticketmaster program gets a week of booking tickets ahead of the general public.
So by the time normal people get to buy tickets, all the good seats have gone. That’s just plain fucked, and the only people to blame are Ticketmaster.
I don’t have a Mastercard because my bank supports VISA, so that’s what I have, a VISA. It’s completely fucked up that I can’t buy good seats to a British comedy duo because of the deal that my bank has with a credit provider. That’s insane!
Ticketmaster should be selling tickets to everyone at the same time. Sure, they’ll lose a probably large sponsorship from Mastercard, but they’ll end up keeping more return business. I’ve never bought tickets from Ticketmaster before, because of their bad reputation. This has just reinforced that, and I will now never buy tickets from them. And may the artists who support Ticketmaster, have really bad audiences whose only real interest is what other shows they might be interested in because they own a Mastercard.
Ticketmaster have a lot to learn about customer satisfaction. As do French & Saunders’ management.