Today, I discoverd a bit of a usabililty issue with an admin tool that an outside developer built for the University of Pittsburgh. It was a faculty bio screen, with an option photo upload.

Once the photo was uploaded, if you went back to edit any of the faculty member’s information, it would display the photo, and in really small type it said “Delete.” Right next to that was a really small checkbox that defaulted to checked.

If you weren’t looking for that, and you edited some other information and then hit Update, well, bye-bye photo.

Turns out that while the data was being input, the data entry person had to go back through all the entries to add some info. End result: only one photo remained in the database.

Whoops.

I advised the developer that perhaps the Delete option should be unchecked by default, to eliminate such mishaps, before we turned it over to the client.

On a related note, I read this funny (and true) post the other day about another developer fudge up called So You Wanna Be a Developer by Matthew Oliphant.

I apologize to all developers (myself included) who do not fit the developer stereotype I have presented in this post.