Wasted Effort

The feeling of a wasted effort is one of the most annoying and disparaging feelings I can have.  Annoying in that the realisation that the time and effort I have put into something is wiped out in an instant, and disparaging in that it completely negates everything you did, reducing your work to nothing.

There are many ways in which this can happen but perhaps most of all for me as a programmer is when this happens as the result of bad design.  Online in the websites we use, and offline in the programs and apps we use.  "save early and save often" is quoted by many who have fallen victim to this inadequacy and the negative ramifications that is has.  Whether it is a document you spend the better part of an hour on and click save only to have to program crash or a in image you spend ages editing and save multiple versions only to realise the original has been replaced.

A bad software designer criticises the user.  If a piece of software behaves in a way that is counter-intuitive it is not the fault of the user for not expecting the software to behave that way, it is the fault of the designer for creating a piece of software that does not do what it is expected to do.  This applies to websites too - which I believe now constitute software in themselves but that is another post entirely. 

This post came about as the result of an experience I had with a website tonight.  I won't name it for legal reasons, notably the fact I want to bash the shit out of it.  I used this website which provides a tool which is "free" to use - this was made abundantly clear before I began using it, what the website neglected to mention was that you need an account in order to save your work - which requires registration, which was indeed free, that's not my qualm.  My qualm is the fact that you enter the site, click "get started" which launches the app in-browser for you to use.  I then proceed to do so, spending quite some time on a project, and when finished I clicked the "Save and download" option - I must clearly state here it is not possible to save as you go along, only possible to save once you are finished and ready to download.  That should have been the first red flag for me, however, I naively decided that was probably to do with server bandwidth etc and had some technical reason.  So I went to work on my project and when I was happy with it I clicked save and download, at which point it said I needed an account, there were two options, either login, or create an account.  So as I had no account yet, I clicked create an account.  Filled out the registration etc and when done I was relieved, then dismayed.  You can probably guess what happened.  The project I was working on was now blank.  Everything lost.

I have to say this is infuriating.  This is bullshit design.  This is an incredibly bad experience that will lead me never to use the site again.  When you click "Save and download" you expect the fucking thing to save.  When it says you need an account at that stage you assume it will save the progress and attribute it to the account you create or the one you log into.  You assume that if it did not, then it would have told you that you need an account before it let you use the fucking app in the first place.  At no point did the site say your progress would be lost if you did not log in before you start.  I even went back to check, if it had said and I did not see, but no, it hadn't.  This has pissed me off.