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[this blog left intentionally ugly]

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Iron Mountain: your site sucks

I have the, um, pleasure of using Iron Mountain's SecureSync website to process our backup tapes every day.  A few months ago they "upgraded" the site and since then it has been much slower and a bear to use.  Today it kept kicking me back out to the login screen and randomly clearing date fields that I had already entered.  I'm absolutely certain that I'm going to hear from them about something I screwed up today as a result of this tomfoolery.

Since they obviously don't care to do any kind of QA on their site with people who actually would use it, I'm offering this as a bit of customer feedback.  FWIW I'm always using the latest public release of Firefox.

RESCHEDULING SERVICE FOR HOLIDAYS
First of all, this should absolutely be an opt-in thing, not opt-out.  Common sense says that the vast majority of businesses are not going to be open on Federal holidays and if they are, they're not going to want to pay extra for Iron Mountain to come out on that day.

But since it's still opt-out, we have to slog through it.

HOW IT WORKS:
  1. Use the ludicrous Menu button and go to Request | Reschedule Service.  Oops, moved my mouse too fast and the menu closed.  Try again.  Oops, went one pixel outside of the imaginary boundary when opening the Request submenu and the menu closed.  *Very slowly and carefully* maneuver mouse to Reschedule Service.
  2. Choose the Original Date: 5/30/2011.
  3. Choose the New Date: 5/31/2011.  Oh, I see I have to select the month again because it didn't auto-populate.
  4. Submit.  Get confirmation message.
  5. Have to do the dates for the rest of the year.  Start over from step 1.  Mess up the mousing again.
  6. Repeat for second account.
  7. Did I forget a date?  I have no idea because there is no way to see a full list of all the reschedules.
HOW IT SHOULD WORK:
  • My theory with the stupid Menu button is that some manager's nephew wanted to show Uncle Bigwig his new mad Web coding skillz and wanted to replace the sane, reasonable, functional menu bar with this horrible abomination. 
  • After choosing the Original Date, the New Date calendar pop-up should default to the actual month the Original Date is in.  Saving a few mouse clicks here and there saves SO MUCH time and aggravation. 
  • The confirmation message is great, but why can't that go on the top of the screen where you enter the dates so we can enter more than one without having to navigate back to the page?  The back button is useless, as you know.
  • In addition to the confirmation message, how about a list below that shows all of the previously rescheduled dates?
OTHER STUPIDITY
  • I cannot fully express how awful the Menu button is.  Please bring back the menu bar.
  • Really, the SecureSync logo at the top of the page doesn't directly link back to the home page, but rather uses some Javascript command that sometimes takes you to the login screen (ARRRGH), sometimes takes you to the home page, and sometimes doesn't go anywhere at all?  What?  Did Uncle Bigwig's nephew code that too?
  • The account changer dropdown has disappeared from the home page but is still present in other places.  It has been replaced by an infuriating Change link that opens up a new window and takes FOREVER to load.  WHY?
  • I have no way of knowing what kinds of containers Iron Mountain has.  There are no pictures or descriptions anywhere.  I spent about half a day Googling and searching through the labyrinthine PDFs on the main Iron Mountain site.  After calling customer service I finally confirmed that such a thing does not exist.
Your move, Iron Mountain.  I'll accept my consultant fee in the form of Amazon gift cards or booze.

EDIT: Oh sweet honey crusted jesus it gets worse:



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