I Could Have Done Better With Hypercard

I am officially completely and totally disgusted with my department.

Today I was required to attend a "training" session in regards to our online financial management/purchasing/reimbursements system thing. They're offering these training sessions in the hopes of getting more people to use it, instead of submitting paper documents. Well, let me tell you, no amount of training sessions are going to get more people to use this piece of crap system.

Management thinks people aren't using it because "they're afraid of new ways of doing things." HA! This is a research center that gets its funding specifically because they're one of the best in the world at figuring out how to create new and better ways of doing things. The faculty and students aren't afraid of new things. They make their livings off of new things. They APPRECIATE new and better ways to do things.

The problem here is that this online system isn't better. It's new, yes. But its already an outdated, poorly programmed, unweildly mess of a thing. Personally, I don't want to ever log into it again.

Now... I'm going to preface this next bit by explaining that I am extremely tech savvy. You give me a new program to use, and I don't need a manual. I just sit down with the thing for an hour, and suddenly I'm an expert. I'm no stranger to basic programming either. I understand the ins and outs. I've designed websites. I've written programs in basic. My BF bombards me every day with information about programming and programming languages that I never dreamed I'd ever hear, let alone actually understand -- but I do understand a lot of it.

That being said: I could have done a better job at designing this thing, and I could have done a better job of it using nothing more than hypercard. Do you remember hypercard? That lovely little program Mac had back in the 90's that let you basically write your own computer programs just by dragging and dropping page elements? Eh, if you don't remember it, that's okay. Imagine Frontpage or Dreamweaver, but for writing applications as well as websites, and much more simplistic.

Seriously. I could have done way better.

The GUI on this "intranet" is so counterintuitive that I spent 15 minutes just trying to figure out which menu item I was supposed to click on. Me. Me, who only ever needs an hour to learn a piece of software well enough to give classes on how to use it. I was completely and totally lost in this web app. The menu set up was beyond attrocious. The "instructions" on each page were convoluted and misleading. The functionality is so limited, that I can get things done faster on paper. Not to mention the fact that this thing is entirely laid out using tables. There are no divs on the page. None. Just tables. Tables and tables and tables, within even more tables.

There is no "help" menu either. No FAQ. Just a 20 page user manual that you have to download in .pdf.

If a professor wants to look at his available funding (a simple thing, a common thing) he has to sift through several pages full of overly long links (not buttons or anything), each time clicking the right one to get further along in the process.

If a student wants to make a requisition, they have to figure out that the correct section of the site to go to for that is "services" then they have to figure out which professor they're supposed to be logging in under, and then they have to figure out which type of requisition they want to fill out -- and none of this is labelled clearly and simply. It's all in accounting staff jargon that no one understands (well, no one except us accountants).

And you know what makes this whole situation worse? It's taken the staff they hired to do this YEARS to get it to the point it's at currently. YEARS! The BF probably could have had it done in 6 months, with way more functionality, and have it so streamlined that no one would be confused about anything, and no "training" would be necessary, as you could tell exactly what you were doing just by looking at the thing.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that the guy they hired to do this barely speaks english, and makes about 3 times as much money as I do.

And I could have done better at it using Hypercard.

*screams in frustration*