We have a new computerized system for a process that has been laborious and semi-manual for decades...

I was told this system had been developed by experts in the art of the human/computer interface and that it would be a piece of cake to learn and a snap to teach others how to use it. Warning bells went off in my head. Why would they feel it necessary to declare the ease of its use...?

This isn't be the first newly computerized process introduced into my workplace and I had high hopes that some lessons had been learned about the human/computer interface and possible pitfalls when we agonized our way through previous applications.

Give it a chance before you have an opinion, I said to myself. I entered the requisite url and let the miracle unfold.

The first screen was modest and clear. There were five choices, all self-explanatory, intuitive. No extraneous stuff to confuse, befuddle. A good start to the decision tree.

The next screen looked remarkably like the first; well, not so bad. But then, I clicked on my designated activity selection and what came up appalled me. The screen was messy with choices, fields to be entered, items to be clicked, I don't know what-all. Most of the stuff being displayed had nothing to do with the activity I had chosen, nor did it need to be displayed for me to do my task.

And the tags! Nothing simple and straightforward, like "car" and "house", but weird terms like "personal internal combustion transport" and "nighttime activity center". When will they ever learn to use intuitive tags, especially when most users are entry level clerks? The other identification items to be entered are 12- and 16-digit numbers with lots of zeros. Bah!

Confronted with the visual mess and the weird terminology, I turned to the documentation, as every good user should. The documentation was clearly written by someone who needs an intensive course in structure and organization of his/her data and thoughts. It would be nice if the author were thoroughly familiar with this application, too.

I'll play around with the program, come up with a simplified set of steps to accomplish the task I have to do, and share it with my cohorts in other field offices. Already I'm getting phone calls asking me to translate this Geekish into English.

"What do we do?" they wail into the telephone. I tell them, I don't know yet and the Super Users obviously don't know either, and the vendor declares they've given us all the documentation available.

And, no, we didn't learn a damn thing from our previous rollout.