It hurts

When I find a website that won't relinquish its stranglehold on important information, I get this really angry jittery feeling and I start to curse profusely. So when my workplace announced that we were changing our scheduling system to an online service called HotSchedules, I was mildly skeptical.

This lasted until I actually had to use the system. Then my skepticism gave way to frustration and, subsequently, furious anger. I could rant about how bad every aspect of this system is until my fingers went numb, but I'm just going to highlight a few of the more blatant transgressions.

Consider this example. This is a seriously tiny fragment of the total interface and yet, there's already so much wrong here. For starters - there is absolutely no need for 3 exclamation points when informing me how many unread messages I have. There's nothing all that exciting about my "1 unread messages" nor is there anything exciting about any of my 51 other total messages, which brings me to my next point. What ridiculous situation would I have to find myself in to make this notice useful. When I first saw it, I thought "maybe that's for when I have 0 messages and still want to go see my messages... and can't click on the messages button in the toolbar..." But then I checked all my messages...

If I have to tell you what's wrong with this, please don't ever design interfaces, as a favor to me and the world at large. When I saw this on a released and established piece of software, I almost lost it. And this was only the beginning with HotSchedules. However, in the interest of brevity, I think I'm going to limit it to one or two other things that really bother me.

So when you click on the messages to take you to the messaging system this window pops up.
I originally pressed continue without typing yes. Right now, you're probably saying "typing yes?" because you didn't read the whole thing either. But yes, this shows up every time you use the messaging system... every time. One thing designers should really be cognizant of when designing a page for usability is the use of the keyboard/mouse. The two should not be interspersed willy nilly. Use of the keyboard in a mouse-heavy site should be pretty much eliminated unless absolutely necessary. I'm pretty sure the above case does not fall into that category.

So I shouldn't have to coin this, but maybe some designers should take note: "Why have 4 buttons when you can have 1?" This requests section is on the homepage. Basically, the homepage is just littered with tiny little modules like this - clearly lacking any thought-out design. This requests module should be eliminated along with the messaging module - they both have tabs at the top of the page.

I've previously admitted that I haven't studied marketing much, this is true... but I have studied HCI/UI and this site makes me wish I hadn't. Maybe if I didn't know how blatantly this site flew in the face of every basic design principal, I could just be mildly frustrated with its clear lack of usability.

Here's the left side of the homepage for reference. Notice how many buttons there are for requests. Two at the top and 4 in the request module. For those of you playing the home game, that's 6 buttons on the homepage that bring you to what is essentially the same place - or at least, if the program was designed well, all these functions could be accomplished in one screen.

All in all, using this program is a completely horrific experience, if you can avoid it in any way, do.