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
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 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
Bastard user from hell
If some guy just minding his own business is your “user from hell” I am truly envious of your job
I feel like, he was not minding the business he was supposed to mind.