I really care about user experience..

I care about it in my job; I care about in my life; I care about when I am exposed to bad and good user experience. User experience drives behaviour; it drives efficiency and productivity; it drives satisfaction (happiness/misery); it drives performance and cost...

That's why businesses should care about user experience.

That's why I'm so agitated by the "time recording" system that has been thrust upon me that I am moved to at least say something online and stop boring twitter with my ongoing one-liners - in the hope that if the designers of this system don't spot this, at least some other designers will.

Here are some traits of the current system, based on a large well known ERP system, that fail the user to the point of wanting to jump out of the window:

• A notes column with only 40 characters. No indication of how many you've used. If you submit and exceed the limit you are told the "field is incorrectly formatted" and all the notes fields for the entire week are wiped.
• If you enter more than 8 hours on any single activity per day - it is reset to 8. (Not good for bean counters tracking all that extra time)
• being told that the "platform" column isn't used, so use that for "notes". (Assuming you can remember and it always remains true).
• calling the "project code" the "network" field - huh?
• having a special 4 digit alphanumberic code (you know, like EJ17 ) to remeber and type in to mark something as travel time - everything else is selected from a list
• having every project denoted by a 7 digit number, unique to the system, with the description of said number being generic and identical for each project (e.g. 8006483 Billable Client Work) - so you go and have to look up every number and see which project it is in a spreadsheet. Which of course, you rapidly forget by the time you look up the next project because the human brain only memorises about 7 things at once.
• the fact that even if you manage to get some meaningful notes for 40 or more hours per week into 40 characters, your approver never sees them anyway
• the fact that there is a meaningless link for "release time" on the page that you have to remember not to use
• the fact that you have to select your indecipherable projects from a list that you can only scroll by clicking up/down arrows. If you type the project data into the form, it doesn't get recognised
• the fact that you only get to see about 9 lines at once before having to click up/down to scroll through your daily entries (and the fact that the system generates a new line every time you vary the notes). 2 actitivies x 5 days a week in itself generates 10 lines.
• Oh  yeah, the secret hidden customisation button: right click (huh??) the secret grey square at the top left of the table...

I could go on, but it's such a depressing example of a compete absence of any thought to usability and user experience, I need to stop now before jumping out the window. This is absolutely the worst example of user interface and implemenation I have ever had to endure.

Designers and Programmers of the World: Please, do not make these mistakes in your software.