My wife Robin and I were having a discussion about ease of use of software this morning, and she came up with a great Bush-worthy new word: Figureoutable. She is in the Navy and her office has to deal with a lot of official message traffic. They are forced to use crappy software to manage, compose, and review messages. She was describing the fact that there are a number of secretaries in the office who have to deal with this stuff, but they are all of a generation and mindset where “computers are hard.” She just made the comment that some of the stuff you have to do using the software is “just non-figureoutable.”

I had to bust out laughing. This word is just so much more descriptive than “user friendly” or discoverable, or whatever other term you want to use.

<Rant>Unfortunately this problem is prevalent in her environment. It drives me nuts as an ex-Navy guy myself to see them still using crappy Win95 era software that looks like it was written by some high school student as a class project, and yet this software is being used to manage core administrative functions that tens of thousands of peoples lives daily and have a significant impact on their ability to do their work, such as message traffic, fitness reports and evaluations, security clearances and so on.</Rant>

Sunday, January 09, 2005 3:48:10 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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