I purchased a newer GPS last year. This one a Tomtom Go 4CT50. I’ve always had problems understanding how Software Engineers and Human Factors people can come up with these horribly useless difficult to use interfaces for what should be a simple procedural interface. (Caveat – I am a professional software engineer… with over 30 years of experience.)
But this latest snafu with the device, which rendered it totally useless, takes the cake for idiot engineering! I used the Tomtom GPS on Friday to drive 4 hours away from home. On Saturday when I fired it up to return home (Remember it knows how it got me here – it’s stored in it’s memory)
All I see is a grey screen saying “Waiting for a valid GPS signal even after multiple attempts to turn it off and on it does nothing but show this message. After I while I notice that I have ‘mail’ on the device. You mean that the device knows something that the sole user needs to know and rather than a useful error message prominently presented they use and envelope icon that I have to click on to read eMAIL!! What country on planet stupid do these engineers reside in? How could that be more convoluted and less intuitive?
My email from my device… “go to a computer and update my device”! Yeah in a campground 4 hours from home… that’s the height of customer service and stupidity. Do the Tomtom people even use their own devices in the real world? How the blank am I supposed to do that, plug into the nearest tree?
Now that I’m home – absolutely no thanks to the useless device I paid hundreds of dollars for… I’m plugged in and trying to follow the directions on the Tomtom web site about how to empty the cache and force their stupidly engineered device to fool itself into uploading some hopefully less buggy instructions.
I think that software engineers should put their names and telephone numbers into the about box so their customers can directly tell them their opinions of their engineering ‘skills’.
