so this morning i went to a two-hour training for the new purchasing system that IU is switching over to later this month. my hci brain had a hard time with it, because quite a bit of time was taken up with phrases like “ohmigod, it is So intuitive! i mean, you might have trouble for a little while with something like forgetting that there’s that one search box where you have to surround the string with asterisks but then in the others you don’t, but… seriously! you’ll figure it out in no time!”

i mostly just sat there and drank my coffee and enjoyed the sick thrill of being able to place an order for 20 microliters of chair in the training environment.

seriously, though, there are a lot of ways that they are totally right. the current system is hoRRendous, and this is a major improvement, so they deserve some credit. that said, it just drives home how low most people’s expectations are, and it makes me feel a bit like i’m living on the lunatic fringe for expecting systemic change.

when i’m honest though, i also think that there is some level where it might not matter that it could be done better. that sounds kind of defeatist, but really i’m just saying: look, do we want to spend all our time shaving seconds and errors off of something that gets the job done? or do we want to get the job done, and move on to new jobs? the problem is, when we start being satisfied with good enough, it makes it harder to see the new possibilities that open up when we push ourselves to find something better. it’s as if all the problems and solutions are wound up together in one big gordian knot, and loosening one section has implications in parts of the system that seemed totally unrelated when we started tugging on the rope…

This entry was posted on Friday, November 11th, 2005 at 1:26 pm and is filed under design, work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.