Michelle's Musings

Technology, when it doesn’t work

Why do so many websites publish their sites without sufficient testing?  I feel like unpaid technical support!  My list of shame: Constant Contact, MindBody Online, Healcode, and now Robly.

My recent frustration is with Robly, a newish competitor of Constant Contact.  They do many things better than Constant Contact and are much less expensive, but there are bugs.  This past week I spent 30 minutes labeling images in our library so I could filter them and get to the ones I want quickly — a fairly common concept and feature of many sites.  Then I selected a label to activate the filter.  The first page of the filtered images displayed.  Lovely.  But when I clicked “Next” or the page number, I got an error page.  Really?  To their credit, the online chat has been very responsive and the helpful Anne reported the problem to their tech support and it was fixed at the end of the day.

Also at Robly, although not a technical issue, is having out-of-date training videos.  I thought instead of bothering Anne on chat, I would watch one of the videos, because they didn’t have written instructions (another pet peeve for another post.)  The screen shot showed options I couldn’t find on my screen.  Back to chat.  The response?  Oh, yeah, we disabled those options and haven’t updated our videos yet.  Way to endear yourself to your customers Robly!

However my biggest gripe now is with Healcode, a service that provides a better customer interface to MindBody Online (the online registration system that PEP uses.)  MindBody has a feature called “hot words” where you can substitute a word of your choice for any word in a particular list.  They use a concept of class levels that are not pertinent to how PEP organizes classes.  We figured out that we could use the levels field as a class location: Maryland, DC, or Virginia.  So we set up the hot word rule:  class level becomes class location.  This works perfectly in MindBody.  And it used to work in HealCode — until it didn’t.  Now on our drop-down menus, it says “Class Level” instead of “Class Location”  If a user is curious enough to click on Class Level, they have a choice of Maryland, DC, or Virginia.  Hmmm.  What could that mean?  Are the classes in Maryland more or less advanced than those in DC?  Sheesh.  It makes no sense.

I reported this error to Healcode months ago.  When I went to their support site to check on the status, I was so surprised to see it marked as solved.  So I posted a response reminding them that it was most certainly not solved!  I was informed that any problem that the help staff had to send to the developers was closed out and marked as solved.  Now I’m at the mercy of the developers, who apparently cannot figure out why this feature is not working.  But it sure makes their help staff look great that all these issues are “solved”!

In the meantime, Healcode is marketing a branding feature that PEP would be very interested in implementing.  But we’re not going to pay more for a service that can work properly one day and not the next, with no explanation or timely resolution.

Now it’s time for more satisfying work.  I’ve got some changes to make to our Access database, and you can be sure I will test them thoroughly before I implement them for our staff!