As I look at all the new 2.0 applications popping up on the web, it strikes me that designers are getting very good at creating interfaces for the general public, ones that are clean, simple, and easy to use.
Then I sit through the training sessions for the new trouble ticket system our IT department is rolling out and wonder where the people who put that together have been living for the past seven or eight years.
If this site was intended for use only by techies, I might be more forgiving.
However, the home page of an application designed for the average teacher, secretary, or administrator shouldn’t have as its central feature their entire problem history.
It shouldn’t use vague terms like “incident”, or prominently display buttons they’re not even supposed to use, or run only in IE.
Letting the tech people know that a printer doesn’t work should be as easy as ordering a book at Amazon, where they hide information until you need it and seamlessly keep track of who you are.
Or submitting personal information to the fake PayPal site, where they would like to. :-)