Comment by ams6110
7 years ago
So true. This year, finally, my kids local school system deployed an online replacement for the ~20 paper forms they require at the start of each school year. I have always loathed filling out those forms, especially since there was no checkbox to the effect of "everything is the same as last year"
If anything, the online version is worse. They essentially preserved the same layout and organization of the paper, just converted to online forms. There is duplicate entry everywhere. I entered my address on at least three different forms, my phone number on four or five. And everything had to be repeated from scratch for each kid. And it was all presented in a weird iframe container that didn't quite fit the content, so you had to scroll around to see different areas of the page. If a phone had been my only way to access these, it would have been even worse.
It was so much like what would have been done in 1995, I could not believe they found this in any way acceptable in 2018.
"everything is the same as last year"
Offtopic: That reminds me of a change I submitted for an in-house time tracker which was for a button that did "Same as last week but with some plausible minor random differences".
I was deeply disappointed that this was rejected.
So much awful software and UX is made by taking a paper based process and directly recreating it as a digital process without re-evaluating the process itself.