Should We Really Be Outsourcing Tech-Writers?

Okay, I had all sorts of things to discuss today. In the last eight days, I've attended two birthday parties, a daddy-daughter dance, as well as a double surgery for the kids to get tubes in their ears. As you can image, all sorts of amusing things came out of these, but those will have to wait, as I have something that presented itself last evening that takes precedence for now.

I'm a geek, a programmer who typically enjoys what he does. In getting my degree, I focused a lot on usability and interface design, but at heart I'm a programmer. Management, on the other hand, is a hardcore usability geek. Naturally, when presented with an interface for software, we can't help but notice the quality of it from a usability point of view.

So, last night we finally sat down to do our taxes, hardly our favorite activity, but something that needs to be done. Last year we switched the program we used because every year we would get to the end and be told that something was wrong, and hunting down the problem was a pain in the arse. Well, last year went pretty well, so I picked up the same software this year, and we discovered that someone had seriously dropped the ball in the interface department, but in silly ways. The software works well. It's the screen text that blows.

For some inexplicable reason, someone decided that it would be a great idea to bold certain words in each sentence of screen text. The thing is, they didn't seem to concern themselves with which words to bold. Like (and I'm going from memory, so it's not exact) the sentence:

This applies to taxes you paid in the 2006 or 2007 tax years.

comes out:

This applies to income taxes you paid in the 2006 or 2007 tax years.

Dude...wait, what? What exactly are we emphasizing here. Seriously, think about trying to scan the page (which I believe is what most people do when facing a bunch of text - Management can correct me if I'm wrong). Should we not be emphasizing the years that apply? How about the fact that it's income tax, as opposed to property taxes? It got really bad when Management started reading them out loud, verbally emphasizing the words in bold. It was just bizarre, and ended in fits of giggles. Actually, that was kind of cool.

This was bad, but when we got to the State taxes, I saw my favorite bad usability bit. We accomplished some measure of work, and were presented with the success message "Progress!". Progress? Seriously? Why not just come right out and say "Hi. The following text is being written by someone who only recently learned English and appreciates the fact that this software is being produced in his glorious homeland of (obscure country name here)." Either way, "Progress!" will become my new favorite saying upon succeeding at something. I may get a t-shirt made.

On the bright side, all of this screen stupidity made our tax preparation more amusing than in prior years. I don't recall this much laughter before. So thanks, unnamed software producer, for making taxes something that brought me joy. You're a real American (and other, obscure country) hero.