RE: Opinion: Worst interface ever.

[Mark Teicher <mht3 () earthlink net>]

I recall this argument all to well during the early days of 
implementing firewalls.  Customers used to go gaga over some X11 
based UI from some vendor versus a curses based ui, that was simple 
to use and less than 7 or 8 config options and a customer's firewalls 
was up and protecting their network from the baddies.
But that was over a decade ago, and not to many people remember the 
days of hiring female technical engineers that could fill a sweater 
and knew a little bit about net-perm tables and proxy gateways.. ..

Still waiting for the Graybeards of Internet Security to have their 
first gathering

At 11:08 AM 7/5/2005, Paul D. Robertson wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Jul 2005, Eugene Kuznetsov wrote:
>
> > I am not familiar with the WatchGuard interface, but I will say one general
> > thing in their defence -- this stuff is harder to do than it seems.
>
> Sure, but while the old interface was ugly, it was intuitive- and
> consistency is important.
>
> > For every user like you, who's annoyed about the redesign, there's another
> > one who demanded that the UI be reworked in the first place: to 
> make it more
> > intuitive for his preferred configuration, or to add options for new
>
> Sure, when a vendor goes from "intuitive and simple" to "where the heck is
> this thing failing, all the things the manual says are done?" I think it's
> bad.
>
> > features. I'll even go out on a limb and bet $5 that somewhere in the first
> > 5 minutes of your ordeal, you took a wrong turn, and it all went downhill
> > from there. Had you taken a different path, it would've all been good.
>
> One of my coworkers had the same issue, so I'm guessing that it's not all
> that intuitive where that turn was.  It's frustrating to go from "hey,
> this product is good" to "hey, this revision is bad!"
>
> I'm really starting to dislike the "interface can't run locally on the
> device" stuff when coupled with "won't log on the device."
>
> > So take this as a vendor perspective: it's not easy, especially since
> > customer requirements are increasingly diverging. More features --> more
> > complexity.
>
> Hey, I didn't ask for more features, someone's marketing department did!
> I'm mostly upset at myself for assuming that the new version would be an
> incramental improvement of the old, not something that two of us had
> serious issues with despite following the instructions in the manual.
>
> I'm also going to add a new vendor test to my criteria- if I can't get
> read-only access to the support site without a login, that vendor's off my
> list.
>
> Paul
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Paul D. Robertson      "My statements in this message are personal opinions
> paul () compuwar net       which may have no basis whatsoever in fact."
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