More and more I find dealing with internet sites to be too frustrating to handle. I just gave up reopening my alldata account and donated the fee to their Christmas party fund. It appears that makes me one of their most profitable customers.
Looking back I recall my first dealing with Alldata was 30 years ago when they mailed me floppy discs every 90 days. when they put the system on line I happened onto cartalk which seems to also be getting complicated.
Some are very intuitive and well designed. Others look like a second grader put it together. I quit Napa becsuse it is just too confusing for a customer. Rock auto though is well designed and easy to use. I had a programmer that put in an are you sure stop just about every step which is how some of these sites seem to operate. Fine if you use it five times a day but if an occasional user it’s the pits.
How can hopefully profitable corporations afford to be so ignorant of their poor customer service?
Sears is a perfect example of corporate ingnorance.
They began in business more than 100 years ago, as a catalogue/mail order enterprise. Somehow, they managed to miss all of the indications (in the '90s & beyond) of the pressing need for a full transition to online marketing, and the result was… not good.
Are you referring to car-repair-data related sites, or all internet sites? In general I find all internet sites are becoming more annoying, adverts & the like getting in the way. One I particularly don’t like is a Google page where you have to click a box saying “Got it” to continue. Insulting to force someone to click “Got it”. But on the other hand, it’s free, so hard to complain too much about something that’s free.
There is a big agenda in the tech industry to make things this way. The big tech companies are behind it, but not the only ones. They provide the software and educational tools to schools that teach web design and software design. They teach users to use very large frameworks for the simplest tasks. I connected to a WiFi captive portal and it downloaded 2MB of Javascript just for the captive portal interface. All of this makes applications very bloated and slow loading. It also forces sites to constantly be updated and browsers to implement the latest features as the libraries that the site is based on change. community.cartalk.com is one of these examples. They rely on 3rd party libraries from companies like Google to run the site. Even if they don’t want to change anything on the site, they have to as the 3rd party changes the libraries. This ensures that the tech industry makes money by having everyone use newer hardware and software or else they can’t use the site.
Site designers have to come up with reasons to constantly be working on the site for their job security. If they design something that works and doesn’t need to be changed for 10 years then they’re out of a job. So it has to always be changing even if the old thing worked just fine.
There is also a push to unify the desktop and mobile experience. Smartphones have limited efficiency when it comes to browsing sites due to the small screen and touch interface. The buttons have to be big and the traditional scroll bar that lets you do page up and page down as well as quickly scroll to any pount in the page doesn’t work. To make the experience equal, they reduce the efficiency of the desktop interface so it doesn’t outperform the mobile version. A smart phone is now meant to be the primary means of browsing web pages, and a tablet or traditional computer with a mouse is now the secondary means.
The new 2 dimensional interfaces on Windows 8 and later are shown to take 30% longer to navigate. A growing number of users go by the look of the interface and how functional it is doesn’t matter so much to them.
Word from the mid 90s has a huge number of features and will load in a small fraction of a second on a modern computer. Today’s word is much bigger and takes longer to load. The user interface is totally different and takes longer to navigate. For the average user, none of the newer features have even been used. But you have to have it since someone might send you a file that is saved in the latest version of Word and there is no other way to open the file. They changed the file format from a binary .doc format, to the ZIP compressed XML .docx format. Single page documents take up more storage space, there is a lower chance of recovering a corrupted file due to the compression, and it takes more processing power to parse the XML format.
Their strategy is to force users on the their platforms. Back in 2005 and before people were not Internet dependent. So they had to be competitive. Today, people are basically forced to use a smart phone or go to a web site to do something. Now that there is no alternative, they can make it as slow and frustrating to navigate as they like. Big corporations like Walmart are in on it with the big tech agenda. Walmart could easily publish a downloadable list of all their product names and the numbers of the isles where they are stocked, but they don’t. They want you to have the Walmart app on your phone and use it in real time to tell you where the poduct is.
There is a benefit to the store for doing it this way, not just big tech. The app lets them monitor you and bombard you with advertising. They amount of data that they can gather from a smart phone is huge.
The smart phone designers have to keep things partially not working right so that there is a reason to upgrade to the next phone with 300% markup every couple of years.
Speaking of search engines like Google, they promote sites that are slow and full of their advertising. The traditional sites that you speak of don’t make it to the high ranking search results. A few years back, Google stopped searching or promoting many traditional discussion forums. But they still search sites like this one that are based on bloated 3rd party libraries.
Do a Google search for prius forum. You’ll get priuschat and toyotanation as the first results. Both have advertising from doubleclick.net, a Google owned company.
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No dispute about your general theme, but there is always an alternative. I had to insert a table into a Word document, experience was frustrating enough I gave up & just drew the table with a pencil. Another example, the state issued me a Covid rebate via a bank debit card. But they didn’t tell me for how much money. While I could spend the money willy-nilly with just the card and 4 digit PIN, the bank’s website said I could only get the balance by creating an account. This required setting up a password. The first password i entered didn’t have enough characters. The second password, still no good, didn’t have both lower case and upper case letters. The third password, still no good, must contain at least 4 numbers. The fourth try, again no good, password must contain at least one special character … lol … I gave up trying to figure out the balance, and just used this debit card at the grocery store on each shopping trip until it was used up. On the final purchase the display still said the same thing "card approved, do you want cash back? I clicked no. " But the cashier had a big frown on her face. As I was packing up the grocery cart to leave: “Sir! You still have a $5.23 balance!!”
Sears should be the biggest on-line retailer in the world. They had all the pieces in place to do so. But they screwed up big-time. In the 80’s LL Bean was the second largest catalog store - only second to Sears. LL Bean transitioned easily (and successfully) to on-line.
It looks like AllData is having the same problem Sears did. You get too many higher-ups who don’t want to change the status quo. I know a lock-smith who’s still in the dark ages. He refuses to go to an on-line system. Instead he buys this extremely expensive equipment that needs to be updated monthly to reprogram car keys. Places like Battery Plus is cleaning this guys clock because they can reprogram a car key far better and FASTER then the local lock-smith can. He’s losing his car business (which is about 40% of his total sales).
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Just curious why? Is there a problem w/the current on-line version of All Data? If so, is the problem b/c they recently updated their website and now it has bugs, and the older online version was ok? Or something else?
From my understanding from some mechanics I know - it’s the response time. Reliable Software is only part of it. Capacity is the other. I designed a website for one company and was told that there would be a MAXIMUM of 200 users a day using it with a MAXIMUM of 20% annual growth rate. 5 months after going live there were well over 5000 daily users. They were trying to blame me and my team for this. We setup a server farm that could handle 100,000 users (at a cost of over 300 times the original budget). - which they paid for. No change in software. Just needed to drastically increase the capacity for their grosly underestimate.
Thannks for the explanation, makes complete sense. Wondering if in situations like this, could be handled without needing more servers by a reservation system? You want to use it now, but it says “full” and asks if you want ot reserve a spot 2 hours later, or the next day. To spread the over-usage to different times?
What was the site serving? If the site is used 8 AM to 11 PM that is 15 hours for 5000 users. If each user uses the site for one hour out of the 15, then that is 333 users on at any given hour. If each user is using 1mb of bandwidth, that is 333mb. One server can handle that with no issues. Did it involve interactive content and a database?
You can’t park at public parks and downtown in my county without a smartphone.
Paid parking is not even handled by an app, it requires a 2d barcode scan, identification and payment with a credit card… all right there by the side of the road. There is no alternative way to pay.
Well now that we are talking locksmiths, a small business person has to be able to justify expensive equipment. Just to stay up to date isn’t enough if the jingle in the cash register doesn’t follow the equipment upgrade.
My locksmith is the only one in town and I have no idea what fancy equipment he has, but I suspect he doesn’t program car keys. I had about three days between trips to replace my dead bolts. I usually lock my garage from the inside and then use the dead bolt on the front door. Couldn’t even get the key in. A visit to my guy for two new matching dead bolts and he rekeyed them while I waited. The whole thing took about 15 minutes. I figure if you want a car programmed just go to the dealer, but Tom is the guy if you have a house lock problem.
I went to automatic billing with one place, now I have to set up an online account to view my bill as paper copies will no longer be sent, I do get an email x amount has been set up for payment on …, login here to see your statement. grrrrrrrrrr Of course I had to do it online as over the phone was not an option.
Ot isthe current corparate fixation on this quarters profits. Customer service is expensive and all they see is, the less they spend on customer service, the bigger the profit,. They either don’t realize they are erroding their brand or don’t care.
Case in point: h ad a new Canon printer delivered 12/24 I hooked it up using my already in place cables and loaded the ink cartridges. The printer made copies if I used the button on the printer, but not from my computer, I went to system preferences and could not see my new printer. A third party repair site said to replace the usb cable but the previous 8’ stout cable was replaced by a 3’ skinny cable. I had t put my primter in my lap to reack it with the new cable but that did not help. When I plugged in my old cable, I could see my new printer.
Time to call customer Service and the automated system told me that I could not call customer service until I had registered my product and had an account. I should have had an account because this is my third Canon printer but I guess the accounts don’t last as long as the printers.
I sighed and created a new account and went to register my printer. The long and tedious registration process registration process did not work. The last steps were grayed out.
Try as I might, I could not find a number on the internet that would get me to customer service without registration. The day after Christmas I tried again on the website and I was sent from one unhelpful article toanother in a great circle, never getting to talk to a live person. Finally I called the sales number andgot to talk to a sales agent who took all my info and all the printer info and said they wiyld send it to customer service.
On Jan 2 I got an email from customer service that said that I could now register and after I did, I called customer service and got the option to speak to an agent. He solved my problem in about 30 seconds. He said my printer was confused and even though I had my new printer highlighted, I had to highlight the old printer and click on the minus sign that I had to scroll down to find.
My first Canon printer and camera came with free support until it wore out after about 8 years. The next lasted 9 years when the trouble light started blinking and was telling me the black ink cartridge was not properl installed. When I called customer suppore I was told I would have to pay for customer service to talk to them,. I decided to buy a new printer instead.
I no longer have any reason the prefer a Canon to any other brand.
That won’t work for someone using the software to earn a living. It forces a user to build his schedule around Alldata’s availability. What will he do for two hours while he waits for his turn in line? Maybe he doesn’t have enough work that doesn’t require the Alldata database.
I can’t get into the specifics, but it wasn’t in the US. It did a lot of heavy server end calculations. It wasn’t just a simple site like this one. It was an N-Tier system. We didn’t change the front end servers. They easily handled the UI load. But the Business and database services couldn’t handle that much of a load increase. We originally estimated a server that would have to be upgraded in about 5 years (typical). But they outgrew it their first month. After 5 months they were really struggling. Had to swap out the 2 servers with a server farm and raid cluster for the increased CPU and database.
Now adays - many companies are doing cloud services ( Diagonal Scaling). This makes it a LOT easier to just add more servers in a short amount of time with minimal upfront cost. That is one big advantage of Cloud services. Small to medium companies should really look into cloud services. Even large companies are using Cloud systems.
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Yeah I feel your pain. I bought a new hp printer before tax season last year. My desk top computer is hard wired but in order to install the printer I needed Wi-Fi. I had to use my iPad to install it and then I could run the cable from the computer to the printer. I guess it was no big deal but I like hard wired for financial stuff so it is not on Wi-Fi. I’m sure come time to replace it, there will be no such thing anymore.