3 ms·

So much software suffers from a large class of users having no choice in its use. For example, our local school district uses Bloomz, which is pretty terrible -

So much software suffers from a large class of users having no choice in its use. For example, our local school district uses Bloomz, which is pretty terrible - both on the web, and in its native app. I can report all the bugs I want, but since I'm never the person making a purchasing decision, how highly do I think those reports are prioritized? I wonder if the teacher/administrator side of things is better.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dboreham 3y ago
I found the best approach is to search LinkedIn for someone at the vendor that's closely connected to me, then compose a cheery message to that person introducing myself as a fellow developer and parent of a user, ask the best way to inject a bug report etc. This actually worked. Ymmv of course.
- kqr 3y ago
  Ohh, this is actually clever. Subversive and I'm not sure I like it, but it sounds very effective.
  - zx8080 3y ago
    Sounds like a hack to make a person to work overtime.
    - amelius 3y ago
      ... while having fun while doing that work.
    - the_fury 3y ago
      If I get a message on linkedin that pertains to a work issue, you had better believe that I'm going to be dealing with it on work time.
- computerfriend 3y ago
  One of the reasons I never put my employer on my LinkedIn profile.
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    Most of life's fulfilling opportunities come from just showing up. Showing up on searches, at work, at the pub.
  - deprecative 3y ago
    If I got a message like this I'd just block the sender. As a developer I have no say in what my owner tells me to work on. I type what they want and nothing more.
    - D-Coder 3y ago
      They're not asking you to fix anything. They are asking where to submit a bug report that someone (someone else) will look at.
      - deprecative 3y ago
        My answer doesn't change. I'm not on LinkedIn during work hours.
- binarysneaker 3y ago
  As someone this happened to, I was actually impressed they looked me up and reached out. Knowing they cared that much meant that I cared too and I was able to prioritise the request with the product team. When we completed the request, we celebrated, and even implemented uservoice on some sites to improve the feedback loop.
hitchstory 3y ago
This software also tends to be waterfalled to hell and back. Theyve already planned out their deliverables for the next 12 months and will be held accountable for meeting them. Your bugfix doesnt fit into that picture unless an exec treats it as a priority. ...in which case it'll be jammed into the devs' task queue with no expectation that the pre-agreed delivery dates will shift.
- datavirtue 3y ago
  The issues you describe have nothing to do with "waterfall."
  - hitchstory 3y ago
    >Theyve already planned out their deliverables for the next 12 months and will be held accountable for meeting them.
    - unclebucknasty 3y ago
      Not sure I understand your point. Are you saying product roadmaps are incompatible with agile?
      - hitchstory 3y ago
        If they include detailed plans and timelines for feature deliveries then yes.
        unclebucknasty 3y ago
        Agile doesn't mean "not planning" or even "vague planning".
adityaathalye 3y ago
Post author here. I agree; so often constructive feedback loops from end users to builders are woefully absent from the equation. I feel the greater the distance between the purchase decision maker and the end user, the weaker the feedback gets. Riffing off the six degrees of separation idea and exponential drop off of signals though lossy media, it's like by the time someone gets to a third degree of separation, any feedback signal barely registers. Only mass action has any chance of being heard, much less heeded.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Ah. So that's (part of) why enterprise software is so universally bad. The users are further from the purchasers than they are in, say, developer tools.
  - adityaathalye 3y ago
    I believe so. I'll pick on Government websites and the systems that back them as an all-too-familiar, internationally reviled category of software, as an example. These tend to be incredibly painful to use. Some tendering process somewhere awards a contract to the lowest bidder who then has the unenviable job of wrangling the delightful intricacies of government machinery to put something out that maybe does what it was supposed to do for the common citizen. In such a world, I feel gov.uk stands out as a remarkable counter-example, worthy of emulation. e.g. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles
jSully24 3y ago
You mention not being the person making a purchasing decision, who is? Can you connect with them? I would encourage you to put together a story that illustrates the pain being caused by this software and get with the purchasers. Not only might it help your organization figure out they need to do something different it could also show off your skills to the orgainization. Could you collect the time you and other people are spending working on these problems? How many issues are reported to you? How many bugs you've filed and have not had fixed by the vendor? Rolling this up into a real dollar coast it's having on you and the school district users.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cratermoon 3y ago
  > who is? Can you connect with them? For something like this, usually at the senior executive level, and organizationally. There's not really one person making the decision, it's done through the organization's decision-making system. Nominally there's a responsible person, but practically speaking that individual isn't completely autonomous. Large organizations have been making and dealing with decisions like this for ages, and rarely does dollar cost of usability ever influence. Products SAP and MS Teams get and retain market share by making the cost of moving off that software outweigh the gains.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  The person making the decision is very like the superintendent of the school system, likely informed by someone from IT and maybe someone representing the teachers somehow. They might listen to me if I bring in a coalition of other parents, but there's two reasons why I'm probably not going to do this: 1. They're likely locked into at least a year-long contract, if not more 2. Doing this is a huge amount of work for me. I'd have to find a significant number of parents who are _also_ as peeved as me, and then get them to take action - even if it's signing something - and then I'd have to bring the petition up to the school board, etc., etc., etc. It's much easier to just mute the notifications on the app, and go through them once a week. 99% of them are just wildly inactionable anyway - things like reminding me that school is out, or that a student interest group that's irrelevant to me is having a meeting two Thursdays from now. If I was annoyed enough to take action, I'd rather just offer to build them a replacement app - shorten that feedback loop, ya know?
germinalphrase 3y ago
As a former teacher, my experience of education specific software was almost universally negative. We may even get an in-person meeting with the software vendor only for the reported issues to remain unpatched indefinitely.
- dahart 3y ago
  As a developer, I’m not at all surprised, I suspect it’s negative from almost all points of view except at the district or city or state level where they pat themselves on the back for bringing technology into classrooms via spending some money, what little money they have, on tech that they don’t use and don’t understand. I don’t even have that much experience with it, but I’ve tried making educational software, in the form of multi-user whiteboards teachers could use for their classes. The people approving purchasing decisions don’t use the software, and don’t ask teachers or students about the experience or value of the software. The insane sales cycles are a never-ending nightmare of requirements and delays, far beyond the reasonable concerns about kids & privacy. After years of run-arounds, we gave up trying to use any official channels and just let teachers use the software free. As a parent, the experience was also very negative. My kids hated almost everything the school forced them to use, because the software was terrible compared to non-educational software. Teachers didn’t get any training on the software, and didn’t have the resources or time to use it effectively. Hardware was always outdated or supremely cheap and crappy. Possible the single worst software experience was the automated essay grading software. It was beyond broken, actively harmful, and it literally didn’t work. I came home from work one day and my oldest kid was in tears and my wife at her wits end trying to finish a homework assignment to write a short concise 2 paragraph essay on a specific topic and achieve an arbitrary 90% score or whatever within 10 tries, and they’d used up 8 of them and scores were going down each time. This software isn’t even supposed to be used unsupervised for grading, but the teachers didn’t seem to understand, and weren’t following recommendations. I figured out quickly the software doesn’t understand english and would score higher if you fed it more words, regardless of their quality or relevance - the polar opposite of the assignment’s goal. So I gave it a wikipedia article on why people shouldn’t use software grading robots, which scored 100%, and then scheduled a meeting with the teacher, who proceeded to complain about the software and told me she didn’t have a choice because it was district rules and a state software contract.
cratermoon 3y ago
There's a whole thing around the nature of who makes the purchasing decisions vs who are the real users. For key organizational systems like Bloomz for schools, the decision is made at the senior executive level, and input from the people who will use the software on a day-to-day basis is rarely, if ever, taken into consideration. Sometimes the decision is made on the golf course between business buddies. In these situations, the vendor doesn't have to care much about user experience or feedback, all they need to do is be able to check all the boxes on the whatever list of features management cares about. It comes up on HN off and on, here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224209. Thread unrolled here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182635589604171776.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182635589604171776.html
rqtwteye 3y ago
This plagues most enterprise software. Decisions are made by people who will most likely never actually use the software. So the decisions are made by cost and ease of dealing with the vendor. Usability is way down the list of priorities.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dboreham 3y ago

I found the best approach is to search LinkedIn for someone at the vendor that's closely connected to me, then compose a cheery message to that person introducing myself as a fellow developer and parent of a user, ask the best way to inject a bug report etc. This actually worked. Ymmv of course.

kqr 3y ago
Ohh, this is actually clever. Subversive and I'm not sure I like it, but it sounds very effective.
- zx8080 3y ago
  Sounds like a hack to make a person to work overtime.
  - amelius 3y ago
    ... while having fun while doing that work.
  - the_fury 3y ago
    If I get a message on linkedin that pertains to a work issue, you had better believe that I'm going to be dealing with it on work time.
computerfriend 3y ago
One of the reasons I never put my employer on my LinkedIn profile.
- datavirtue 3y ago
  Most of life's fulfilling opportunities come from just showing up. Showing up on searches, at work, at the pub.
- deprecative 3y ago
  If I got a message like this I'd just block the sender. As a developer I have no say in what my owner tells me to work on. I type what they want and nothing more.
  - D-Coder 3y ago
    They're not asking you to fix anything. They are asking where to submit a bug report that someone (someone else) will look at.
    - deprecative 3y ago
      My answer doesn't change. I'm not on LinkedIn during work hours.
binarysneaker 3y ago
As someone this happened to, I was actually impressed they looked me up and reached out. Knowing they cared that much meant that I cared too and I was able to prioritise the request with the product team. When we completed the request, we celebrated, and even implemented uservoice on some sites to improve the feedback loop.

hitchstory 3y ago

This software also tends to be waterfalled to hell and back. Theyve already planned out their deliverables for the next 12 months and will be held accountable for meeting them. Your bugfix doesnt fit into that picture unless an exec treats it as a priority. ...in which case it'll be jammed into the devs' task queue with no expectation that the pre-agreed delivery dates will shift.

datavirtue 3y ago
The issues you describe have nothing to do with "waterfall."
- hitchstory 3y ago
  >Theyve already planned out their deliverables for the next 12 months and will be held accountable for meeting them.
  - unclebucknasty 3y ago
    Not sure I understand your point. Are you saying product roadmaps are incompatible with agile?
    - hitchstory 3y ago
      If they include detailed plans and timelines for feature deliveries then yes.
      - unclebucknasty 3y ago
        Agile doesn't mean "not planning" or even "vague planning".

adityaathalye 3y ago

Post author here. I agree; so often constructive feedback loops from end users to builders are woefully absent from the equation. I feel the greater the distance between the purchase decision maker and the end user, the weaker the feedback gets. Riffing off the six degrees of separation idea and exponential drop off of signals though lossy media, it's like by the time someone gets to a third degree of separation, any feedback signal barely registers. Only mass action has any chance of being heard, much less heeded.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Ah. So that's (part of) why enterprise software is so universally bad. The users are further from the purchasers than they are in, say, developer tools.
- adityaathalye 3y ago
  I believe so. I'll pick on Government websites and the systems that back them as an all-too-familiar, internationally reviled category of software, as an example. These tend to be incredibly painful to use. Some tendering process somewhere awards a contract to the lowest bidder who then has the unenviable job of wrangling the delightful intricacies of government machinery to put something out that maybe does what it was supposed to do for the common citizen. In such a world, I feel gov.uk stands out as a remarkable counter-example, worthy of emulation. e.g. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles

jSully24 3y ago

You mention not being the person making a purchasing decision, who is? Can you connect with them? I would encourage you to put together a story that illustrates the pain being caused by this software and get with the purchasers. Not only might it help your organization figure out they need to do something different it could also show off your skills to the orgainization. Could you collect the time you and other people are spending working on these problems? How many issues are reported to you? How many bugs you've filed and have not had fixed by the vendor? Rolling this up into a real dollar coast it's having on you and the school district users.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cratermoon 3y ago
> who is? Can you connect with them? For something like this, usually at the senior executive level, and organizationally. There's not really one person making the decision, it's done through the organization's decision-making system. Nominally there's a responsible person, but practically speaking that individual isn't completely autonomous. Large organizations have been making and dealing with decisions like this for ages, and rarely does dollar cost of usability ever influence. Products SAP and MS Teams get and retain market share by making the cost of moving off that software outweigh the gains.
pavel_lishin 3y ago
The person making the decision is very like the superintendent of the school system, likely informed by someone from IT and maybe someone representing the teachers somehow. They might listen to me if I bring in a coalition of other parents, but there's two reasons why I'm probably not going to do this: 1. They're likely locked into at least a year-long contract, if not more 2. Doing this is a huge amount of work for me. I'd have to find a significant number of parents who are _also_ as peeved as me, and then get them to take action - even if it's signing something - and then I'd have to bring the petition up to the school board, etc., etc., etc. It's much easier to just mute the notifications on the app, and go through them once a week. 99% of them are just wildly inactionable anyway - things like reminding me that school is out, or that a student interest group that's irrelevant to me is having a meeting two Thursdays from now. If I was annoyed enough to take action, I'd rather just offer to build them a replacement app - shorten that feedback loop, ya know?

germinalphrase 3y ago

As a former teacher, my experience of education specific software was almost universally negative. We may even get an in-person meeting with the software vendor only for the reported issues to remain unpatched indefinitely.

dahart 3y ago
As a developer, I’m not at all surprised, I suspect it’s negative from almost all points of view except at the district or city or state level where they pat themselves on the back for bringing technology into classrooms via spending some money, what little money they have, on tech that they don’t use and don’t understand. I don’t even have that much experience with it, but I’ve tried making educational software, in the form of multi-user whiteboards teachers could use for their classes. The people approving purchasing decisions don’t use the software, and don’t ask teachers or students about the experience or value of the software. The insane sales cycles are a never-ending nightmare of requirements and delays, far beyond the reasonable concerns about kids & privacy. After years of run-arounds, we gave up trying to use any official channels and just let teachers use the software free. As a parent, the experience was also very negative. My kids hated almost everything the school forced them to use, because the software was terrible compared to non-educational software. Teachers didn’t get any training on the software, and didn’t have the resources or time to use it effectively. Hardware was always outdated or supremely cheap and crappy. Possible the single worst software experience was the automated essay grading software. It was beyond broken, actively harmful, and it literally didn’t work. I came home from work one day and my oldest kid was in tears and my wife at her wits end trying to finish a homework assignment to write a short concise 2 paragraph essay on a specific topic and achieve an arbitrary 90% score or whatever within 10 tries, and they’d used up 8 of them and scores were going down each time. This software isn’t even supposed to be used unsupervised for grading, but the teachers didn’t seem to understand, and weren’t following recommendations. I figured out quickly the software doesn’t understand english and would score higher if you fed it more words, regardless of their quality or relevance - the polar opposite of the assignment’s goal. So I gave it a wikipedia article on why people shouldn’t use software grading robots, which scored 100%, and then scheduled a meeting with the teacher, who proceeded to complain about the software and told me she didn’t have a choice because it was district rules and a state software contract.

cratermoon 3y ago

There's a whole thing around the nature of who makes the purchasing decisions vs who are the real users. For key organizational systems like Bloomz for schools, the decision is made at the senior executive level, and input from the people who will use the software on a day-to-day basis is rarely, if ever, taken into consideration. Sometimes the decision is made on the golf course between business buddies. In these situations, the vendor doesn't have to care much about user experience or feedback, all they need to do is be able to check all the boxes on the whatever list of features management cares about. It comes up on HN off and on, here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224209. Thread unrolled here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182635589604171776.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182635589604171776.html

rqtwteye 3y ago

This plagues most enterprise software. Decisions are made by people who will most likely never actually use the software. So the decisions are made by cost and ease of dealing with the vendor. Usability is way down the list of priorities.