I have never fully capitalized any word in a forum post but here I am, doing that with the word "PLEASE" in my title post. Why? Well, let me first explain the topic.
Vast majority of web sites, and certainly all forums like ours, have a little brother watching over you. OK, it is actually a big brother and its name is Google! Yes, you heard it right. Anytime you come here or just about any forum online, a few lines of code hidden in the page calls a Google service called Analytics. Once you view the page, the code calls home and Google creates a transaction record of what it knows. It will store for example where you came from, i.e. what web site if any, and an imprint of what it knows about you which is the same data used for advertising. This gives us detailed stats such as page views per day, whether the visitor has been here or not, time spent on site, etc. This forms a critical backbone of analyzing web site data to determine what changes are effective in increasing traffic and what is not. It is especially mission critical for sites that sell items but even for us, we get pretty solid set of statistics that helps us figure out where we stand in the wild world of the Internet.
The service is free to us to use as website owners. All you have to do is create an account and you are "good to go." Once there, you have a dashboard that you use to tell Google what statistics you want to view. This is a random example of what it looks like:
Typical of Google user interfaces, it does the minimum and as if there is a police to watch over them, no more. Simple things like resizing the graphs can be impossible or really hard to do. And typical yet again is Google messing with the interface with no user feedback to know if it is a good idea. But that is for another rant. This one is about the simplest thing. If you run the dashboard and then let it sit for a few minutes, you get this wonderful abomination:
This is run on Google Chrome by the way so it is Google software end to end. The cause for the internal error is simple: time out! Many websites in order to assure security, will automatically log you out after a period of time as you have no doubt have seen with your banking site and such. Likely that is what Google Analytics is doing, i.e timing out. But to pop up an "Internal Error?" Are you kidding me? I mean didn't a single person in the entire Google corporation not test what happens if you run this tool, leave it in a tab and come back to it to find this error? This happens every time, and has been the case since I started using it some 3+ years ago.
And what "request" is it talking about? I had it sitting there doing nothing. I was not requesting a single thing other than sit there wait for me to tell it what to do next. That it decides on its own to time out is bad enough, but to pretend that it is failing due to me asking it something adds severe insult to injury.
Internal error messages should be reserved for the most obscure failings in the software and not something as remotely common as not telling it to do something for a few minutes. And if you are going to throw up this way, at least give me a clue as to why you are doing it. I happened to have figured it out but most people would be sitting there thinking there is something drastically wrong with what they are doing when in reality, it is all incompetent programming and lack of respect for the end user.
Honestly Google. Developing good consumer facing software is not this hard. Great software can be hard but I don't have such aspirations for you. Just doing enough as to not make me cringe when I look at what you call software.
These are the things you must do:
1. Tell your developers that quality code matters in something other than your back-end engines.
2. As management, be sure to use the software yourself. Until you do, you will never appreciate the problems your customers are seeing. "Eat your own dog food" as we used to say at Microsoft. No, using google search alone does not count.
3. Don't be confused: just because you give away your software, it doesn't mean the quality can be anything it wants. You get a ton of data from web sites which I am sure you use internally for something you are not telling us. So the software is not "free" anyway.
4. Make sure your testers get your attention Mr. manager. Yes, they can be the naysayers. But they can also save you from embarrassing disasters like the one I am writing about.
5. Create a usability lab and have people use your software including "enterprise" or B2B ones like Analytics. Just because the interface gets used by "IT types," it doesn't mean you throw total crap at us.
As an aside, it is remarkable that Google practically owns this market. It is a simple service to create with little cost to run it. Amazing that no one else has gone after it and as a result, we are stuck with whatever junk Google throws at us.
Vast majority of web sites, and certainly all forums like ours, have a little brother watching over you. OK, it is actually a big brother and its name is Google! Yes, you heard it right. Anytime you come here or just about any forum online, a few lines of code hidden in the page calls a Google service called Analytics. Once you view the page, the code calls home and Google creates a transaction record of what it knows. It will store for example where you came from, i.e. what web site if any, and an imprint of what it knows about you which is the same data used for advertising. This gives us detailed stats such as page views per day, whether the visitor has been here or not, time spent on site, etc. This forms a critical backbone of analyzing web site data to determine what changes are effective in increasing traffic and what is not. It is especially mission critical for sites that sell items but even for us, we get pretty solid set of statistics that helps us figure out where we stand in the wild world of the Internet.
The service is free to us to use as website owners. All you have to do is create an account and you are "good to go." Once there, you have a dashboard that you use to tell Google what statistics you want to view. This is a random example of what it looks like:
Typical of Google user interfaces, it does the minimum and as if there is a police to watch over them, no more. Simple things like resizing the graphs can be impossible or really hard to do. And typical yet again is Google messing with the interface with no user feedback to know if it is a good idea. But that is for another rant. This one is about the simplest thing. If you run the dashboard and then let it sit for a few minutes, you get this wonderful abomination:
This is run on Google Chrome by the way so it is Google software end to end. The cause for the internal error is simple: time out! Many websites in order to assure security, will automatically log you out after a period of time as you have no doubt have seen with your banking site and such. Likely that is what Google Analytics is doing, i.e timing out. But to pop up an "Internal Error?" Are you kidding me? I mean didn't a single person in the entire Google corporation not test what happens if you run this tool, leave it in a tab and come back to it to find this error? This happens every time, and has been the case since I started using it some 3+ years ago.
And what "request" is it talking about? I had it sitting there doing nothing. I was not requesting a single thing other than sit there wait for me to tell it what to do next. That it decides on its own to time out is bad enough, but to pretend that it is failing due to me asking it something adds severe insult to injury.
Internal error messages should be reserved for the most obscure failings in the software and not something as remotely common as not telling it to do something for a few minutes. And if you are going to throw up this way, at least give me a clue as to why you are doing it. I happened to have figured it out but most people would be sitting there thinking there is something drastically wrong with what they are doing when in reality, it is all incompetent programming and lack of respect for the end user.
Honestly Google. Developing good consumer facing software is not this hard. Great software can be hard but I don't have such aspirations for you. Just doing enough as to not make me cringe when I look at what you call software.
These are the things you must do:
1. Tell your developers that quality code matters in something other than your back-end engines.
2. As management, be sure to use the software yourself. Until you do, you will never appreciate the problems your customers are seeing. "Eat your own dog food" as we used to say at Microsoft. No, using google search alone does not count.
3. Don't be confused: just because you give away your software, it doesn't mean the quality can be anything it wants. You get a ton of data from web sites which I am sure you use internally for something you are not telling us. So the software is not "free" anyway.
4. Make sure your testers get your attention Mr. manager. Yes, they can be the naysayers. But they can also save you from embarrassing disasters like the one I am writing about.
5. Create a usability lab and have people use your software including "enterprise" or B2B ones like Analytics. Just because the interface gets used by "IT types," it doesn't mean you throw total crap at us.
As an aside, it is remarkable that Google practically owns this market. It is a simple service to create with little cost to run it. Amazing that no one else has gone after it and as a result, we are stuck with whatever junk Google throws at us.
