Why I Hate Blackboard
Here's a dialogue box from Blackboard, the courseware I use. They're apparently a market leader and the product has been in production and used for something like a decade or more.
In this dialogue box, I'm attempting to download the course grades so that I can import them into Excel--Blackboard sports a variety of grade tracking options, but they're not robust enough to allow me the grade calculation options I need. As you can see, the dialog box provides some instructions on how to import the downloaded file into Excel and a tip on finding the file after it's downloaded to my hard drive. This is good.
I tried this three times in a row and wasn't able to locate the file (even after using a search function on all my local drives to find the file). I tried various mutations of the filename and was about to just give up. Then I had been (out of a habit ingrained by using thousands upon thousands of similar dialogue boxes) clicking "OK" to download the file. In fact, "OK" in this particular box actually means "Cancel"--in order to download the file, you have to click "Download" rather than "OK".
Logically, I see what the designer(s) meant. And maybe I'm a moron, but that's irrelevant in this case. If a particular interface feature is so common that people expect to use it in a certain way, designers have to be very careful to not violate those expectations.
(Don't even get me started about the morass of "OK" dialogue boxes that Blackboard uses for nearly every user action. In order to enter items on the course calendar in Blackboard, I have to click something like seven varying acknowledgments. For every freaking item. As you might expect, this makes it very, very time- and effort-consuming to outline a course schedule at the start of the semester.)
Posted by johndan at April 27, 2004 01:59 PM
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