This last week I was super-frustrated by two things that happened with a new tool I am setting up. Grab your drink of choice, pull up a chair, and dive into these latest frustrations and the lessons I had to learn (again).
As a (mostly) digital marketer, I use a lot of online tools. I've gotten really good at adopting new and using existing online tools. I can usually figure out how something works just by poking around. And, when I can't, then I'm very good at wrangling answers out of an FAQ or out of help files (if they exist). So, when I tell you that I had a very stupid moment with a newly adopted tool, you'll know where I'm coming from.
Let me start by explaining the situation. At my day job, I’m the Head of Marketing and also the ad-hoc Head of Technology (?). I don’t really have that last title, but since I have a lot of experience with adopting online tools, it usually falls to me to get those new online tools setup. I’m not complaining. In fact, I’m happy to do it, as my skill set also includes setting up a system that works with what a company needs (or reaching out when I’m not sure). In the case of this latest tool I really needed to set it up, as it’s partially a CRM (customer relationship management) tool and also an online payment portal. I’m also the web developer for our company and I need to make sure all our current integrations between systems are kept in-tact or updated for this new toolset.
Anyway, I got signed-up initially for the service and started poking around in the program to see where I could customize it. I knew it was a program that could be heavily customized from several videos I had watched. However, figuring out where to do the customizations was easier said than done. I finally found the answers in their FAQ section, which is extensive. I found the article I thought I needed and started making changes, but got caught up when some of the steps didn’t seem to be working like it was showing in the tutorial.
Let me tell you, that I am not the type of person that asks for help at the first sign of trouble. I spent several hours trying to figure out how to get these customizations to work. This happened over a couple of days, in between trying to get other work done. Maybe it was because I wasn’t entirely focused on this task, or because I was just having a couple of bad brain days. They do happen, afterall. Either way, it was the end of probably the third or fourth day of literally beating my head against the wall of this problem, and trying desperately to get something to work, that I realized what was wrong. In the eternal words of Taylor Swift “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, It’s me”.
There was a single link in the article I was reading that I apparently needed to read first, which gave me the starting steps that I was missing. I had, somehow, completely missed that the link was in this article. The funny thing is that I had read the article in my attempt to figure out what was going on, but hadn’t realized that it was the starting step.
Once I realized what had happened, I felt so stupid. I also realized that I had been scanning the beginning of the article (where the link was) I guess because I thought it didn’t have any important information. Lesson learned, hopefully…
Guys, read the instructions thoroughly. Seriously. It will save so much time.
The second frustration actually comes from the same tool, but for a different reason. A while ago, I switched to using Opera as my browser instead of Chrome. It’s built on Chromium, just like Chrome is, but has serious benefits for chronic “too many tab” users like me. There are some downsides, though, and I hit one with this tool. It didn’t work on Opera. Once I tried to login, it gave me a white screen and nothing else. Obviously something is hinky here.
You would think a browser based on the same code set would display a website at least partially the same as the other browser based on the same code set. No such luck this time, though. This is not the first time I’ve run into this issue, either. There is something that prevents a couple of websites I use from displaying or working correctly in the Opera browser.
Anyway, this is my PSA to you and to me that not all websites work or look the same on all browsers. As a developer I know how true this can be, and how hard it is to keep up with all the new browsers (and their many extensions) that are out there. Still, sometimes what doesn’t work surprises me.
Did you have any frustrations this last week? How did they make you feel? I’ll commiserate with you down in the comments.
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