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If by Cancel You Mean OK, Then OK

ps-ok.jpg

Damn, I hate PeopleSoft's interface. Above is the confirmation message I get when I use the system to email one of my classes (I blurred out the recipient addresses in Photoshop).

At the above point in the interaction, it's too late to actually cancel the message even if I'd wanted to. So if by CANCEL you mean OK, then yes. I was half expecting that when I clicked Cancel PeopleSoft would respond with TOO FREAKING BAD.

This is not an isolated bit of interface stupidity in PeopleSoft. Users are frequently trapped in dead ends that require them to jump to the top level and start again (rather than being able to back up one level), confronted with confusing or downright contradictory button labels to select from, new windows spawned without any warning or consistency, and missing important status messages because they're displayed hundreds of pixels away from the user's focus point on the screen.

Comments

Sounds like Zimbra, our "collboration suite." Bloated crap delivered via Ajax, so it runs slow on even the fastest machines. Widgets differ just slightly from the OS. Interface basics like Undo are absent. I bet checking it against the 1984 Mac HI guidelines would fail 50% or more of the time. Ah, progress.

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