Driving Me to Blog

I decided a long time ago that I wasn't going to be a drinker so what else can I do in situations like this but blog.

Tonight at church we had a training session on our new worship presentation software, MediaShout.  Uggh.  One of my pet peeves is software that tries to be cute at the expense of usability.  

If you haven't had the horror of a first impression of MediaShout yet then I say good for you. This is a classic example of a software package that tries way too hard to be cute.  The result is that nothing is intuitive. 

This is bad in most every case.  It's VERY bad for software that is used primarily by volunteers who (at least at our church) may only use it once per month.

I have to confess, I was REALLY disappointed.  I've met people from Media Shout.  They definitely invest in marketing their product.  I truly expected WAY more. 

Dear MediaShout,

You guys may have a technically solid product. Honestly I don't know.  But your UI stinks.  It totally misses the mark (isn't that adefinition of the origin of our word, sin...).

Anyway, Nick Nicholaou brought this very thing up recently.  He's right. If you want to do something special, take what you've done and find a way to make it spot on simple.  Now that would be something to Shout about.

Computers are hard enough for the non-geek set.  It's VERY rare that cute works.  Keep it simple and you'll have fans.  Software like this drives me to want to write my own.  I probably won't.  For now, I'll just have to blog.

Since this is my inaugural post I need to say thanks for reading.  I promise my posts won't always rag on products.  My hope is to contribute another voice to the excellent conversation going on today where Ministry and Technology intersect.