Your point about making the end user do more of the work is well-taken. At least by me.
It is amazing how long it takes to get certain “simple” tasks done now. The interfaces suck so badly. And it is so hard to reach a real person that can be understood by a person of average (or better) literacy.
SMH
UI’s are a particular pet peeve of mine.
I don’t pretend to be a programmer, but I know enough from both sides of the coin to see that UIs today appear to be designed by incompetents. I think part of it was the switch to smaller format devices with touchscreens, and then forgetting that plenty of people still have a keyboard/mouse and big screen.
Part of it is also the upside/downside of CSS, I think.
Whatever it is, it appears nobody’s doing any sort of user acceptance testing, and if they are, they’re not doing it on a variety of platforms/formats. They certainly don’t seem to consider backward compatibility, user familiarity, alternative browsers/OSs or high usage scenarios.
I can’t believe how many times I have to move my hands from keyboard to mouse and back and forth because it didn’t occur to the designer to implement tabbed/arrow field navigation on an input screen. Or implementing logic that, when exiting a field, causes the page to redraw losing all the previous input. It’s infuriating. Or the input’s are all on the left, but the processing buttons are all on the right, or all the way at the bottom of a giant form. Or worse, they move around in unexpected ways or different places from screen to screen in the same app.
And it’s not just smaller orgs. MS is just as guilty as are several Oracle products we’ve used. Salesforce is a damned nightmare to navigate.