For a customer on my work we have to use an ITIL incident and problem management application called ’BMC Remedy ITSM‘, created by BMC Software.
I’ve seen a lot of applications, some worse than others, but this one is probably on the top the list.

About 4 or 5 year back I got my first Apple computer, a white MacBook. Back than I was also still using my old Windows computer besides my MacBook. One of the things you start to notice when you begin using Mac OS is that applications can be both functional and beautiful.
It’s just like most of the Windows software developers just don’t care about how their applications look like and behave. All they care about are features. Just get as much in as possible. This often leads to application that have a cluttered and ugly user interface and are horrible to use.

You might ask why I should care about the design of an application and not just what it does. I ask you why not? Having an application that does it’s job well and looks good adds an whole new level of user experience to it. Making it pleasant to use the application and not just yet another boring application.

Things by Cultured Code

One category of these applications are task management applications. Take a look at Things, created by Cultured Code. Besides Wunderlist, created by 6WunderKinder I was not able to find any other task management application for Windows that looks like these two do.

Now back on BMC Remedy ITSM.
This is an absolutely horrible application to use. I don’t know why they even dare to sell that to their customers. I will show you some examples of why this is.

Remedy cluttered user interface

First of all, an over cluttered and illogical user interface. Take a look at the screenshot on the right and see for yourself.
When you want to use an template you have to click the field and then press the ‘Enter’ key. This will open a popup where you can select the correct template. Come one…click the field and hit enter to open up the popup. Who thought that is a good idea?
Another one is what I would call ‘popup frenzy’. About every link in the application opens a new window. We have to use the application on Citrix. Until recently the default browser on that environment was Internet Exploror 6. Now we have Internet Explorer 7 so each link now opens a new tab instead. Somewhat better, but still…
Another thing you can see in the screenshot is that the interface does not scale with the browser window. Hello!! We live in 2011 now. About everyone has a a high resolution screen.
The fact that the interface does not scale also results in scrollbars within the application. Take a look at the left most column. In the middle there is some kind of status indicator. It’s just an image. But because the space reserved for this image is too small you get to see scrollbars. The same for the menu below it.
There are more of these examples in this application but I will keep it with this.

If you are looking into implementing Remedy in your organization feel free to do so. But if you can please do yourself and your staff an honor and look for alternatives.

I will probably do another post in the near future about some of the Mac application I like.
And for you Windows developers, please take some more effort in the design of your applications.

If you have any likewise experiences feel free to share them below.