As a leisure time philosopher I keep asking myself, if things really are as they seem to me. Without some alighting answers to this question I'd be lost in paranoia for sure. So I also ask whether I could become friends with my tormentors.
Requirements for usability of software have intensified with hundreds of apps, which show, how things can be handled easily even on very tiny screens. Indeed the screen size has brought up a need for concentration on the most important functionality, yet big enough to be easily recognized and touched by a finger, but restrained enough to not disturb the visual content.
If those findings would already apply to all desktop software we could be really happy (I could discuss SAP GUI for weeks!!!).
But also Confluence has some issues as I encounter on a daily basis, being the admin for seven wiki spaces in a company with estimated 350 wiki spaces and 60,000 users worldwide (of which 9000 read my spaces).
I'm not the server administrator. So I have to report the issues to the Servicedesk and I also started to report to the community here some years ago. My expectations were not met. Usability is neither a topic our internal admins care a lot about nor does Atlassian. So I drew back from placing change requests and joined into the choir of lamentation that things aren't easy.
Coming back to the initial question: can the ones who reject my change requests still be my friends or let's better say my saviors? How do they prove they are willing and capable of doing what I consider to be essential for my 8000 users?
Just a few examples:
a) we have a need to use Wiki pages in beamer presentations instead of PowerPoint. Is this resolved? No.
b) we need an editor which can handle graphics with several layers. Result? Nothing.
c) we need best possible performance for hundred thousands of include macros on millions of pages. It's just stupid, that all content loads before the page is displayed. But this hasn't changed yet.
d) multiple labels need to be given to whole branches of subpages in no time. But there's no improvement in label handling.
e) as a space admin I need a good and fully automatic labeling of unread pages to keep track of redundant content.
All those issues would help me and my users to save time and efforts at a very large scale. Actually I don't see any useful feature coming up and I don't feel understood by Atlassian at all with my needs as a simple space admin. There's no use for me in any hacks, which need to be performed with data base access, because I don't have it and I don't want it. I need those features implemented in the application standard. But this is something only the guys could do who ignore me sustainably. Will they be my buddies some day?
