After 30 years working in IT, I have a few opinions.

Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

MindBody and search

Oh, my.  Here is a classic case of software developers not testing properly.  Or, in our very specialized world, perhaps it is quality control staff testing software they do not understand and thereby cannot  test vigorously.

There is a quick search box in the admin view of MindBody, where you can type in someone’s name and quickly go to that client’s data.  Most of the time it works.  There is also an advanced search with lots of filters to allow you to really home in on a select group.  I haven’t had to use it much, but it has worked for me as well.

Now, last week I was on the phone with a client whose last name is O’Connor.  I typed in the last name and got no results.  I knew that we had at least one O’Connor, so I changed the search to just “connor” and got the matches you would expect, plus three O’Connors.  However, the O’Connor I knew was not in the list.  (At this point in my phone conversation, I had to answer the client’s question about her enrollment in a class and didn’t have time to puzzle over the search not working.  I went to the class roster and there she was!  I could click on her name and proceed from there.)  Later I went back and tried the advanced search, left all the filters alone, and put in O’Connor in the search box.  Presto, 10 clients were listed, all with the last name O’Connor.

So why would a quick search not use the same search algorithm as the advanced search with no filters?  I understand they perhaps were trying to optimize the search, but at the very heart of the code, the name search should be the same.

Next, it’s obvious that no one tried “difficult” names in testing the search.  Any 101: Intro to Programming student could write a routine to search on a single word.  It’s the spaces, dashes, and apostrophes that throw you off.  Yet somehow, MindBody, which is a large company that provides online scheduling, registration, sales, management, and other services geared towards yoga studios and health clubs, hasn’t tested non-standard names in their system.  Apparently they are happy to let their customers find the errors for them.  And we’re supposed to trust them to process all our client’s payments and keep their data secure.

Category:

Technology

Tagged with:

HealCode letting me down again

OK, it’s been 5 months since I notified HealCode that the MindBody hotwords were not all working properly for our website.  I have had no correspondence from them other than the terribly unhelpful clarification that problems marked as “solved” in their customer support database are no longer the responsibility of the customer support staff.

The latest problem:  we have enabled a wait list for several of our programs, so clients can put their name on the list to be notified automatically if a spot comes open.  It works fine in MindBody, but we are using the HealCode Enrollment widget.  The widget is lovely and a better user interface than the standard MindBody formatting.  The Waitlist has worked in the past.  Now, however, the HealCode widget is not displaying the Register button or a Waitlist button.  So the casual user would not know that they could be put on a waitlist.

While trying to figure out whether I could solve this problem with some non-evident settings, I was clicking on the Help/Support links on the HealCode website.  The link for “Known Issues” yields an error message: “oops.  You’re not authorized to access this page.”  Really?!  So I dutifully submit the waitlist error as one request and this URL error as another request to their customer support site.

Guess what happens next?  HealCode lists the URL error as “solved” and sends me an email that they are combining my 2 requests.  My 2 unrelated requests.  OK, I try the link and it’s still not working.  Now, presumably, when they fix the link they can mark my combined request as “solved”.

Oh, an email just came in.  The waitlist is a known issue with MindBody.  Oh really?  Too bad the link to known issues isn’t working!

Not only is this not “customer service”, it is customer aggravation.

Category:

Technology

Tagged with:

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!

Category:

Technology

Tagged with: