I had this one user who kept using an old report. It used a terribly provisioned db account and had to be changed.
We created a v2 that was at feature parity to v1 and told users to move off of v1. Slowly but surely it happened.
Except one user.
We put up nag screens. Delays on data return, everything we could go “carrot” them to the new version but they stuck with it.
Eventually I called the guy and just asked him, “Why are you still using the old version?”
His answer, “no one ever told me about the new version.”
I asked him if he got our email. He said no. I forwarded it to him.
“Oh.”
I asked him didn’t you read the nag screens? He said no.
I asked him, “The page doesn’t allow you to move on until you wait 90 seconds. Why didn’t you read it?”
“I didn’t think it was important.”
I learned an important lesson that day: never wait for all users to move. Once you have enough, start doing scream tests.
I was on-site for users learning our new program. Watched them do something, a dialog came up, and faster then i could catch what it was, they closed it. Dialogs are warnings or confirmations you know, and they did not know what it was…
So yeah, sometimes I do think there should be a wait time on the OK button.
I used to work for a university trying to modernize how people got student and financial data. Over half my work was playing politics rooting out people who refused to change and going above their head. We had one guy who didn’t want to update a script on his end to include the bare minimum amount of ‘security’: a hard coded plain text password. It took me months and I had to go to his office to update his script and he complained about it the entire four minutes it took
Email to all:
“Due to budget constraints, resources will shift from $oldThingy to $newThingy. As a result, $oldThingy’s availability can no longer be maintained at the previous level.”
Then randomly kill oldThingy for more and more hours each day.
Bastard user from hell
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Bastard user from hell
Every IT/software group needs to have one, otherwise you get complacent.
“The other 98% of the codebase.”
I remember my engineer being such a hardass on using v2 of our API and when I went to implement a feature, v2 didn’t even have ANY of the endpoints I needed
I don’t get why anyone would publish v2 when it not really on feature-parity. Do companies really start releasing v2 endpoints slowly?
it’s called the strangler pattern, where the new version is layered on top of the old and gradually replaces it.
it usually doesn’t work.
