I continue to be amazed by the horribleness of benefits web front-ends. I recently did a simple task in our Hewitt system, and it required five pop-up windows. It's just so, so terrible.
I've used ADP myself as a startup founder. Yeah the interface is annoying. So is Craigslist, whatever. That line of argument isn't necessarily dispositive, both of them have been reasonably adept at solving the problem I engaged with them to solve.
I would say if you have as much power as ADP does, everything that happens is a moment for self-reflection.
I use ADP and I think their front end is horrible. It works but it's enough of a pain point for others to switch.
ADP EZ-Labour - not so EZ, but plenty of labour. There are 20 work days in a month. There are 20 rows in the timesheet form. Every one of them has 8 drop-down boxes, and every one of them needs to be filled with your work status, project code, etc, individually. No group actions. Seriously.
What's so frustrating about benefits front-ends is just how much low-hanging fruit is sitting there uncollected. I'm not asking that ADP implement some awesome canvas-based rendering with AJAX storage and async field update - I just want a lousy 'apply all' button and maybe working tab order between the form controls. Jeebus.
I'm sure there are several other great time tracking ones, too. Is there a particular reason you must use ADP's timecard tracking?
Our accounting department uses EZ-labour to keep track of our work on different projects and for registering time-off and vacation. Realistically most of us only work on one project, but accounting wants the time cards filled out anyways.
EZ-Labour is unfit for personal time-tracking. For one thing, the UI is clumsy and repetitive. If I work on one thing consistently for a week, I have 5*8 slowly updating combo box fields to enter at the end of the week.
For another thing, the work categories are defined by the accounting department, not by the users. The categories aren't useful for me - they're useful for accounting.
Also, you can't always fix errors. There's at least one bug in EZ-labour where accidentally entering hours on a weekend can't be removed.
EZ-Labour's front end could probably be improved a LOT, quite easily. But it's Enterprise-Grade Software - no one who made it is using it, no one who is buying it is using it, no one who uses it has an opportunity to fix it, and there's clearly no user-feedback being incorporated into the design. It's bad software being shovelled out by a big, dumb, blind company. That's really what characterized Enterprise-Grade Software - it's produced by a silo-ed organization and there's no opportunity for feedback and iteration, so it never gets past it's shitty v0.1 state.
This is why people pay them, there user interfaces are bad. However it is bad interfaces over reliable services... there competition in this case offers great interfaces over other peoples services.
Is this really accurate? Doesn't Zenefits exist to merge several services, only some of which ADP provide? And while many people have said that ADP's front end is bad, it seems like you've taken those claims a step further by claiming that people only pay Zenefits to avoid having to use it (rather than cross-platform integration which is their real purpose).
We seem to understand never to "judge a book by its cover"...except when it comes to web interfaces.
I liken it to tech's war on banks. Everyone loves to make fun of the fact that banks still use "old" technology like mainframes, but when was the last time a bank went down? I will go with a old school bank over a NewCo tech bank any day when it comes to nontrivial things like storing my money.
Just because you can't see the uptime of non user facing banking backends doenst mean they don't run into problems