Technical Writer

Today I had a frustrating experience with some software. The cause was simple, and fixing it was easy too—once you knew how—but the problem should never have happened in the first place.

It was a simple error. A web-based performance management system where you had to type in achievements you had completed in the last six months. I filled out the form and clicked Save. Save appeared to work, the system went away and did what it had to do, and moved on to the next page. It was only by chance that I went back to the page later to make a further update. And what did I find? None of my changes had been saved.

I had probably spent twenty mintues typing up what I wanted to put into these fields. Twenty wasted minutes. I put the information in again. Not quite the same detail, because obviously I didn’t think about it as much this time around, and clicked Save again. Save appeared to work again, but still nothing. My edits were not going through.

I tried a host of different ways to update the field, to no avail. I tried the user manual. It was totally useless. One of those frothy, light things full of marketing-speak that said how wonderful the product was, but didn’t tell you how to do anything. 

Finally, I called the one person in the company who knew the system well.

“Did you put a value in the … field?” she asked.

Well no, I hadn’t. The field had not had a value in it before. It did not appear to be important, and the system did not complain because I had put nothing in it. Why would I even think to complete that field?  But, sure enough, I put a value in that field and everything worked fine.

I wasted nearly two hours finding this out.

Multiply this by everyone in the company, because everyone had to complete the same form. That’s a lot of wasted time. 

This, to me, is a bug that needs fixing pronto. It’s a tiny error. On a web based system a temporary fix could have been implemented by any of the following:

• Adding a note to say that this field was compulsory
• Adding a validation for this field
• Providing a decent user manual that actually explained what you had to do for that task.

But allowing the user to fill in the whole form, and then rejecting it without even giving them an error message—that’s unforgivable.

Last Modified : January 18th, 2008
Filed under : Tech Writer
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