Having spent the past month or so working at a fairly major PC hardware retailer (most will know who this is), I’ve been forced to become reacquainted with a piece of software known as Sage Line 100. It’s what they use for all invoicing, accounting, etc. at this place, and the developers of the custom modules used must have a really sick sense of humour when it comes to interface design and usability.

Now this company has been using said software in one form or another for about eight or nine years, and as the company as grown new modules have been written and added to Sage to accomodate for functionality required by features such as online ordering, a live stocksystem, and so on. However, while the breadth of functionality has changed considerably over the years, the actual UI itself hasn’t.

It’s DOS-based, which personally I don’t mind (I prefer text-based UI’s anyway), but the vast array of embedded and poorly described menus and options has to be seen to be believed. Combine that with various dead-ends (menu options which take you deep into the system and leave you with no way out other than to perform some non-descript but drastic sounding function), and just plain retarded design make it damn painful to use at times (actually, most of the time).

I think this is the best example. Check it out. Here I am about to complete an invoice by taking payment. It’s for a telephone order (specified in an earlier menu), and the choices I’m given in regards to what I can take as payment are shown here. Notice option 1 - Cash.

This is a little strange as if it’s a telephone order you can’t really accept cash as a payment, but lets select it anyway. Check out what appears next. So yeah, that option doesn’t do anything apart from calling me a ‘pratt’. Nice, real nice. Instead of taking the time to perform a simple check against an earlier choice and adding / removing that menu item accordingly the developer(s?) instead decided to leave that in and flash up a box which insults the user.

That pretty much sums the whole system up. Something designed not to perform a particular task or function, but more to piss off and hinder whatever poor bastard happens to be using it at the time with the odd insult thrown in here and there for good measure.