So I wake up this morning, get some coffee and start reading my various e-mail accounts. Except that a major one has changed to a 'new and improved!' format overnight, without any prior warning, and I sit there squeezing my eyes narrow trying to see where it is that I can now check my distant account and where my folders have been placed and why the page looks like fresh snow after birds have hopped all over it.
Every time computer people change something to 'new and improved!', my body memory of the old system is wasted, gone, no longer there. All those lightning-fast, instinctive acts take you exactly nowhere. You have to sit there, with narrowed eyes, and use forefinger pokes. And time passes, your gallbladder rebels, and then you decide and go write a blog post instead. (The graph above tells you the story. In the old system my location was far to the right on the horizontal axis, but the system change dropped me right next to the vertical axis, and the effort and time needed for each mail check increased enormously.)
It's not a big complaint if a change indeed vastly improves the system. But so many of these changes do not improve much anything, yet every single one of them has that relatively lumpy learning requirement, and it looks to me as if the supply side of this market doesn't care about it very much at all.
Which is weird, because the customer is presumably the queen or king, right?
I may just be curmudgeony about this, just as I'm curmudgeony about Twitter. Because of those learning costs and the time requirements and the need to see some value in return for all those. But talk me out of this if you wish.
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Hee! I added a picture to make this blog more alluring. I'm nuts.