It’s a poor carpenter who blames his tools. (anonymous)

Once again, I beg to differ. 

Internal tools, for example, are notoriously hard to use. These are typically sold on feature sets and price, with the poor employee who has to use the thing usually having no input whatsoever. In addition, that unfortunate person simply can’t just walk away from their tool, like they can if they were a consumer on a bad website or looking to upgrade some personal software and shopping around. Internal tools can have a surprisingly long shelf life. 

Now, all that is pretty much a given. Everyone knows that even the best companies are not going to give the same effort and attention to internal tools that they will to customer-facing ones. It’s just a fact of life.

What I really don’t like, though, is the rather blase, blame-it-on-the-user attitude that this quote implies. If it’s not something that we would ever do with customers, why is it so okay with internal users? 

As an anonymous programmer said on a discussion group I found:

“Da Vinci with a mop and a bucket of mud may be a better painter than you, but he would never beat Da Vinci with quality tools.”

And how many Da Vincis are you surrounded by at work? Also, isn’t ease of use part of “quality” anyway? 

I guess I’m commenting on this now because I’ve been seeing a lot of this lately in the newer tools that come out. Every tool out there seems to have so many implicit functions, so many cryptic icons, and so little text explaining anything. And they all seem to assume we are all expert users who use their platform all the time (and likely no others). 

Building on top of that is the number of tools the average employee is expected to master. For me, it’s the Microsoft Office suite, plus a dozen usability and market research tools, some designer tools (Invision, Sketch, Axure …) plus “productivity” tools (Jira, Confluence, Trello …), just as many “communication” tools (Slack, Teams, email …), and dozens of internal nightmares (i.e., different vendors for travel, expenses, training, benefits, insurance …).

Maybe the issue is really just TMT – too many tools!  So, take 100 different tools (all with competing UIs – and most of very questionable quality), mix together, shake vigorously, and watch the chaos ensue!