Firewall Wizards mailing list archives
RE: Opinion: Worst interface ever.
From: Mark Teicher <mht3 () earthlink net>
Date: Tue, 05 Jul 2005 20:53:59 -0400
I recall this argument all to well during the early days of implementing firewalls. Customers used to go gaga over some X11 based UI from some vendor versus a curses based ui, that was simple to use and less than 7 or 8 config options and a customer's firewalls was up and protecting their network from the baddies. But that was over a decade ago, and not to many people remember the days of hiring female technical engineers that could fill a sweater and knew a little bit about net-perm tables and proxy gateways.. ..
Still waiting for the Graybeards of Internet Security to have their first gathering
At 11:08 AM 7/5/2005, Paul D. Robertson wrote:
On Tue, 5 Jul 2005, Eugene Kuznetsov wrote: > I am not familiar with the WatchGuard interface, but I will say one general > thing in their defence -- this stuff is harder to do than it seems. Sure, but while the old interface was ugly, it was intuitive- and consistency is important. > For every user like you, who's annoyed about the redesign, there's another> one who demanded that the UI be reworked in the first place: to make it more> intuitive for his preferred configuration, or to add options for new Sure, when a vendor goes from "intuitive and simple" to "where the heck is this thing failing, all the things the manual says are done?" I think it's bad. > features. I'll even go out on a limb and bet $5 that somewhere in the first > 5 minutes of your ordeal, you took a wrong turn, and it all went downhill > from there. Had you taken a different path, it would've all been good. One of my coworkers had the same issue, so I'm guessing that it's not all that intuitive where that turn was. It's frustrating to go from "hey, this product is good" to "hey, this revision is bad!" I'm really starting to dislike the "interface can't run locally on the device" stuff when coupled with "won't log on the device." > So take this as a vendor perspective: it's not easy, especially since > customer requirements are increasingly diverging. More features --> more > complexity. Hey, I didn't ask for more features, someone's marketing department did! I'm mostly upset at myself for assuming that the new version would be an incramental improvement of the old, not something that two of us had serious issues with despite following the instructions in the manual. I'm also going to add a new vendor test to my criteria- if I can't get read-only access to the support site without a login, that vendor's off my list. Paul ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul D. Robertson "My statements in this message are personal opinions paul () compuwar net which may have no basis whatsoever in fact." _______________________________________________ firewall-wizards mailing list firewall-wizards () honor icsalabs com http://honor.icsalabs.com/mailman/listinfo/firewall-wizards
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Current thread:
- Re: Opinion: Worst interface ever., (continued)
- Re: Opinion: Worst interface ever. StefanDorn (Jul 05)
- Re: Opinion: Worst interface ever. Jan Tietze (Jul 06)
- Re: Opinion: Worst interface ever. Dave Piscitello (Jul 18)
- Re: Opinion: Worst interface ever. sin (Jul 21)
- RE: Opinion: Worst interface ever. Paul D. Robertson (Jul 05)
- Firewall Log Analysis - Computer vs. Human Adrian Grigorof (Jul 06)
- Re: Firewall Log Analysis - Computer vs. Human Kevin (Jul 06)
- Re: Firewall Log Analysis - Computer vs. Human Devdas Bhagat (Jul 06)
- RE: Firewall Log Analysis - Computer vs. Human Paul Melson (Jul 19)
- RE: Opinion: Worst interface ever. Mark Teicher (Jul 06)
- RE: Opinion: Worst interface ever. Eugene Kuznetsov (Jul 06)
- RE: Opinion: Worst interface ever. Paul D. Robertson (Jul 06)
- Re: Opinion: Worst interface ever. Ian Rae (Jul 06)