Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Why is everything hard work these days?

This is actually one of the key aspects of good software design. The designer has to remember that the user interface must do two things - it must be easy for an inexperienced user to learn how to navigate, whilst at the same time being powerful and flexible so that an experienced person can get what they need to get done with the minimum of fuss - but after the newbie has learnt what to do, they then don't need to be molly coddled any more, and there's nothing like an overly simplistic interface to get you annoyed when you're trying to get something done - using a car's sat nav for example.

IBM used to have quite a neat way of navigating through menus. If you knew where you were going you could just enter '"1.3.2.7", whilst leaving the newbies to go through all the screens and options one by one, but for some reason that approach seems to have fallen out of favour.

Fortunately for designers (but unfortunately for the luddites ) the level of expertise and familiarity with different interface types is growing very rapidly, so the number of people who really haven't got a clue and have to be catered for is rapidly reducing as even boomers and silver surfers prove themselves capable of learning 21st century skills

But you still see poor design crop up a lot in websites where you have do click on endless buttons to get anything done, or in AI Chatbots that have very poor parsing algorithms. Check out the Severn Trent AI for a particularly egregious example.

And of course we must be careful not to blame the software engineers when all they are doing is trying to implement completely ridiculous business rules inflicted upon them by clients who really haven't got a clue about how businesses need to run these days...

A few weeks ago I had confirmation from Laithwaites that a case of en primeur wine had arrived at the warehouse and was ready for delivery.

Nothing fancy, just some reasonably priced Rhone which we like.

There was a phone number to ring to arrange payment & delivery. I rang the number, but could not make the call centre operator understand the words "en primeur". OK, her first language wasn't English, but really? A wine merchant?

So I gave up, and found an alternative way in. So frustrating.

Pre lockdown we had to make a travel insurance claim for a cancelled flight from St Mary's to Newquay because of bad weather.
The difficulty I had trying to explain what country the Scilly Isles were in - come on now a travel insurer should have some geographic knowledge 😡

It can only get worse....

last week Caroline was called by a 92 year old neighbor who had had a fall getting out of bed.....
This was at 2am.
111 Called but our neighbour had enormous difficulty getting the person on the phone to understand that she didn't have, nor want, either a mobile phone or an internet connection. Eventually our neighbour rang off and called again and spoke to someone without an obvious eastern European accent. This resulted in a call back from 111 from a Doctor, who was helpful and understanding. An ambulance arrived about 20 min later and after a night in SDH, some scans and blood tests our neighbour came home. The wait to be admitted to A&E was 5 mins. Excellent service.

In the hospital our neighbour was expected to get into a bed that had just been vacated... infection control anyone?
When clean sheets arrived our neighbour was expected to make her own bed, and was criticized for not doing it correctly. As a retired RAF Nursing Officer she gave the A&E person the sharp edge of her tongue, with the result that the agency person simply disappeared: our neighbour's comment was that here seemed not to be anyone in charge.

So some excellent service and some that was distinctly wanting. Both the 111 call handler and the A&E department are getting a formal complaint, because the phone number our neighbour has is supposed to be flagged as from a vulnerable, old person living on her own.