#oneaday Day 500: Catharsis

One of the main tools I have to use in my day job is a flaming garbage fire of suck, but our team's procedures are so entrenched in the stupid pile of shit that there's no point in even attempting to talk about all the things that are wrong with it. So I thought in an attempt to provide myself with some sort of catharsis, I would list all the things that are wrong with it here instead. This probably won't mean anything to any of you, but it'll make me feel better, at least.

Okay. Here we go.

Hi [redacted], I just wanted to raise an important issue: the fact that [redacted] is a colossal pile of garbage and should be cast in the trash as soon as possible, along with its useless developers. Here are all the things that are wrong with it, and that will almost certainly never be fixed:

• The stupid pile of crap doesn't fit on any monitor I've ever used it with. Horizontal scrolling is a huge no-no in web design. This is amateur-level stuff. Add some — any — CSS to make it responsive, or at the very least fit on a normal-resolution monitor.

• The "Generation" page, which is supposed to export the content we work on, fits on the screen so badly that the labels for the options tickboxes at the side of the screen are actually underneath all of the tickboxes instead of next to them. As in, all the tickboxes are blank and unlabeled, then there's a list of labels.

• Talking of "Generation", if I export a project that amounts to one title field and a short piece of copy (about 20 words or so), the resulting file should not be thirty megabytes — so big that it doesn't fit through the dumbass "File Transformer" application to turn it into something actually usable.

• Also talking of "Generation", is it too much to ask that [redacted] can actually export things in the format we need it to? Having to export it, delete things from the resulting zip file to make it small enough, run it through "File Transformer" then finally import it to our CMS is the most cumbersome nonsense I've ever seen.

• You keep complaining that we don't respond to the comments from various locales on the projects. This is because 1) there are no notifications when new comments are added, 2) the button that indicates there are comments if you do happen to look at the right page at the right time is presented in bright yellow on white and 3) the specific comments are indicated by a small dot that is literally 4 pixels wide, which you will only see if you are looking at one of the 300 pieces of content that make up a single project.

• If my login times out due to it taking a while to complete a task, I would like to resume where I left off after logging in, rather than being informed that my "MySearch has expired" or that the "edition is not found".

• If I click a "generate email" button to send a message to people, I expect it to 1) actually generate an email, 2) actually send it to people and 3) actually include the correct information rather than requiring me to trawl through pages of pointless information looking for a GUID then copy and paste it manually into an Outlook message (having run it through the "Swapping Tool" to generate specific links for each locale, of course!)

• Putrid green, white and grey is not a nice colour scheme.

• Please read a book on UI and/or UX.

• Please ditch this atrocious software and hire someone who knows what they are doing to develop something that is actually designed for what we are doing with it.

• [REDACTED] IS SHIT

Thank you for indulging me there. I feel slightly better. Until tomorrow, anyway. Back to the grindstone, I guess.