I can report all the bugs I want, but since I'm never the person making a purchasing decision, how highly do I think those reports are prioritized?
I wonder if the teacher/administrator side of things is better.
I feel the greater the distance between the purchase decision maker and the end user, the weaker the feedback gets. Riffing off the six degrees of separation idea and exponential drop off of signals though lossy media, it's like by the time someone gets to a third degree of separation, any feedback signal barely registers. Only mass action has any chance of being heard, much less heeded.
I'll pick on Government websites and the systems that back them as an all-too-familiar, internationally reviled category of software, as an example. These tend to be incredibly painful to use. Some tendering process somewhere awards a contract to the lowest bidder who then has the unenviable job of wrangling the delightful intricacies of government machinery to put something out that maybe does what it was supposed to do for the common citizen.
In such a world, I feel gov.uk stands out as a remarkable counter-example, worthy of emulation. e.g. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles
In these situations, the vendor doesn't have to care much about user experience or feedback, all they need to do is be able to check all the boxes on the whatever list of features management cares about. It comes up on HN off and on, here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224209. Thread unrolled here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182635589604171776.html
As a parent, the experience was also very negative. My kids hated almost everything the school forced them to use, because the software was terrible compared to non-educational software. Teachers didn’t get any training on the software, and didn’t have the resources or time to use it effectively. Hardware was always outdated or supremely cheap and crappy. Possible the single worst software experience was the automated essay grading software. It was beyond broken, actively harmful, and it literally didn’t work. I came home from work one day and my oldest kid was in tears and my wife at her wits end trying to finish a homework assignment to write a short concise 2 paragraph essay on a specific topic and achieve an arbitrary 90% score or whatever within 10 tries, and they’d used up 8 of them and scores were going down each time. This software isn’t even supposed to be used unsupervised for grading, but the teachers didn’t seem to understand, and weren’t following recommendations. I figured out quickly the software doesn’t understand english and would score higher if you fed it more words, regardless of their quality or relevance - the polar opposite of the assignment’s goal. So I gave it a wikipedia article on why people shouldn’t use software grading robots, which scored 100%, and then scheduled a meeting with the teacher, who proceeded to complain about the software and told me she didn’t have a choice because it was district rules and a state software contract.
By making kids “accept” to be arbitrarily graded by an automated black box on seemingly virtuous but absurd criteria in practice, they’re being trained for what the future of work might become if coporations get their way and put AI everywhere they can. Or if they’re lucky they learn instead to cheat the system and/pr hack it but that’s a minority who will become misfits in their professional lives.
I hope you were able to cheer your kid up, regardless but this is a scary look into the near future.
I would encourage you to put together a story that illustrates the pain being caused by this software and get with the purchasers. Not only might it help your organization figure out they need to do something different it could also show off your skills to the orgainization.
Could you collect the time you and other people are spending working on these problems? How many issues are reported to you? How many bugs you've filed and have not had fixed by the vendor? Rolling this up into a real dollar coast it's having on you and the school district users.
For something like this, usually at the senior executive level, and organizationally. There's not really one person making the decision, it's done through the organization's decision-making system. Nominally there's a responsible person, but practically speaking that individual isn't completely autonomous.
Large organizations have been making and dealing with decisions like this for ages, and rarely does dollar cost of usability ever influence. Products SAP and MS Teams get and retain market share by making the cost of moving off that software outweigh the gains.
They might listen to me if I bring in a coalition of other parents, but there's two reasons why I'm probably not going to do this:
1. They're likely locked into at least a year-long contract, if not more
2. Doing this is a huge amount of work for me. I'd have to find a significant number of parents who are _also_ as peeved as me, and then get them to take action - even if it's signing something - and then I'd have to bring the petition up to the school board, etc., etc., etc.
It's much easier to just mute the notifications on the app, and go through them once a week. 99% of them are just wildly inactionable anyway - things like reminding me that school is out, or that a student interest group that's irrelevant to me is having a meeting two Thursdays from now.
If I was annoyed enough to take action, I'd rather just offer to build them a replacement app - shorten that feedback loop, ya know?
...in which case it'll be jammed into the devs' task queue with no expectation that the pre-agreed delivery dates will shift.