This Is Broken!

I have just come across a great presentation given by Seth Godin at Gel 2006, entitled “This is broken”. It’s an amusing take on the bad design that populates the world all around us. It has got me thinking about the broken designs I work with, and what I might be able to do about it.

In the past week I have been delivering a course on Advanced Excel for Decision Analysis. The last time I gave this particular course was to a client four years ago, when we were all using Excel 2003. Now I am (as is my client this week) using Excel 2007. I needed therefore to update my materials with new screen and dialog shots, and a lot of the menu options have changed.

Actually, the menus no longer exist. Microsoft broke its design with the introduction of the “ribbon”. I muttered and cursed at the time, but now I have grown to like it. Nevertheless, some of my programming efficiency has been lost.

The key to being really productive with Excel is to abandon the mouse and do everything with the keyboard. Pressing [Ctrl+B] is so much faster than moving the mouse to a little icon in the ribbon/toolbar and clicking the bold button. So in Godin’s sense my programming technique is “broken on purpose”. I get productivity by ignoring all the productivity improvements Microsoft spent so much to create.

As I prepared my training materials I realised that there are other broken elements of Excel.

• The NPV function is broken.
• Relative range names are broken. Perfectly valid Excel code, which worked in version 2003, now corrupts your model and crashes Excel 2007. It’s taken a while to find it, but there is now a straightforward workaround.

What examples have you got of broken design?