The every buggy ektron has this lovely bug feature. When one tries to create a piece of content in a different charset (language) it hangs for a about thirty seconds or so and then throws and error. In addition the flow (or lack there of) to creating the new pieces of content in a different language is just plain cumbersome. First you select the the piece of content, then you choose your language the indistinguishable drop down that onselect runs a call to create the new content in the selected language. Really? What if I need to do this for several hundred pieces of content? Even if the application was memcached fast (it’s not, far from it) that is still an inefficient implementation that gives no consideration to the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle. I am by no means a UI expert. Which is to say that while i have opinions on the subject and can identify good and bad UI design elements when I see them I do not have a track record for implementing anything but the most basic UI. It was basic because I don’t have the experience to do any better. With ektron it seems to have implemented i’ts UI by coping other things that are popular on the web at the moment. Do they not understand that many of these elements in their UI only lead to a look that screams “Design by committee and what was popular at the time?” I know that UI experts are expensive but rather than marketing their app as a bells and whistles product for corporate america, they should invest in some UX upgrades and more robust testing.
10/6/2010 ~ 2 min read
