Thursday, April 23, 2009




In the movie "Monsters Vs. Aliens", there is a scene mocking bad design. In the movie, two identical buttons are side by side. One launches nuclear weapons. The other makes coffee.

This is, of course, designed to mock bad design. But consider the following: In expensive, professional financial software, Hyperion Planning 9.3.1, there are two buttons side by side. One reformats the database ("Create"), deletes all scripts and load files and in general returns the application to an out-of-the-box state. The other button refreshes the data, which is a necessary function to maintain the data and is used on a daily basis. This bad design decision is rendered even worse when one considers that in addition to THIS create button, which one is never to press, there is ANOTHER 'Create' button, which one is required to press to push changes to the security provisioning system back to the Essbase server.






Hyperion Smartview Errors

This is the worst kind of dialog box. It tells you nothing except that the designer could not anticipate this kind of error. And it is typical of Hyperion Smartview, the buggiest enterprise software ever to exit the doorway of Oracle.