Discussion
Google Classroom sends you notifications on your phone when students leave comments on their homework assignments. So, being a good teacher I rush to see what it says. Only the phone app will not display comments. And it's boxed up so you can't use the webapp on the phone.
This is what I mean by thoughtless software. Why tell me about it if I can't see it?
There are at least two dozen UI/design problems like this one. Thousands of schools PAY for this. Pay. With cash money!
@futurebird What I'm about to say is vibes. But. As a software engineer with reasonable UX experience and deep experience in project management. I get a very particular feeling, whenever I use *Google software specifically*. All Google software feels to me as if people in one room wrote a list of requirements, as bullet points. And people in another room implemented those requirements exactly. And no one from the first room went back and ran the whole thing and asked "did the result make sense?"
@mcc This description makes me so angry.
@mayintoronto @futurebird No law but Conway's Law
That's the problem with having written software - when the program you're using acts poorly your fingers start to itch, wanting to pull up the code and correct it. Often I can "see" the bad code dancing before me, taunting me.
You just need to invite two dozen teachers(they could even all be from the same city) feed them lunch and have them show you how they use the software and tell you about what works and what doesn't.
Watch as they don't use time-saving features because you made them non-obvious. Suffer as they say they hate the feature you love the most.
Implement 2/3s of the suggested changes. Start with the easy stuff.
eg. just don't send a notification for something they can't see.
DONE.
I one inherited version 2 of an "infrastructure", that we were going to build into version 3 for use in an upcoming potty. So I went into the data center and talked with the folks currently using v.2 with the previously built project, and asked them how it was going.
They mentioned one weird behavior that made life harder for them. It seemed pretty weird, so I went and checked the code....
Maybe I'm a little bit of a software karen but I don't really care. I know the process to find and fix these flaws and it's not rocket science. Few things are.