Examples of bad software design

"As soon as an organization achieves significant market power, though, it's tempting for it to not listen any longer."

Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2017/01/a-listening-device.html

A while ago I went to the Pentaho conference in London where Matt Casters, the developer of Pentaho Kettle said that he is going to run a session called "Pentaho Sucks". I thought what a s great example of how to make software better.

Unfortunately in real life I constantly seeing sales people running around and screaming "Our software is great".   They are unable to see the problems and unable to listen especially to the developers.

The developers do not buy the software, managers do

Here are some examples of bad and ignorant software design, I am not going to mention companies names so you can guess it yourself.

Variables Dialogue:

First of all why it is a dialogue?

This  

     

should look like that

Also

• No Sorting 
• No Filtering
• No Incremental Search
• No Grouping
• How about dialogue resizing?
• It would be better to have separate dialogue for editing variables with syntax highlighting.
• OK/Cancel buttons should be at the bottom

Just imagine if you have thousands of variables, how will you find the one you need?

Expression Dialogue:

Another fantastic example of bad design, it feels like five years children designed this screen. Why not put OK/Cancel in the middle of the screen?

• No Sorting 
• No Filtering
• No Incremental Search
• No Syntax highlighting
• How about dialogue resizing?
• OK/Cancel buttons would be better at the bottom

Find dialogue



Once the dialogue and the editor is closed all the settings are lost.
So the use have to enter "Find what" again. That is extremely easy thing to fix but who cares about developers time?
Having searches history will help a lot as well


"This willful ignorance and lack of engagement can last a long time, but it never lasts forever. Someone who listens better eventually shows up and changes the game."