Why are networking UI's so technical and unintuitive?

Question

Even though I am an experienced programmer and engineer, I find that I always run into tedious problems when dealing with networks. Rarely do installations of routers etc work out of the box, and you find yourself trying to learn all kinds of acronyms like WPA, UPnP, etc, and have a hard time trying to map these with the conceptual logic of networking. I think this is particularly true of networking; it is a lot easier to troubleshoot things like compiling, installing hardware peripherals, or display East Asian fonts on your computer.

Why are networking UI:s so poor? Is networking intrinsically complex and difficult, reflecting the UI? Due to security issues? Or are the problems more of historical nature? Or do you disagree with me entirely?

UPDATE 2009/22/1: I think the commenters below have a good point in that appliance companies don't afford to contract software engineers, giving priority to hardware skill. But I feel that networking is worse than any other category when it comes to UI, terminology etc, so I am looking for answers that is particular to networking.

Answer 1

Because usually software for the appliances is done by people who are not trained as software engineers; because in order to make those appliances cheap, they save on literally everything, so no dedicated UX designers for you.

Answer 2

No commonality.

Every vendor has differing ideas on what the interface should be like, and quite often different terminology.

Not to mention the fact that most of the equipment is made in the far east and the translations, either documentation or in the software interfaces is usually very poor.

Answer 3

As covered in the latest blog (33) all software from hardware companies is bad. I'm not convinced that this is just because HW engineers aren't trained to write good software as Joel says, after all most SW engineers aren't trained to write good software either!
I think it's more market,money and time - you don't choose an embedded uP, DSP, FPGA or even a router based on it's software so there is no advantage to doing more than the minimal friday afternoon job on it.
It doesn't get any better the more you spend, you can pay $10k for a uP devkit and it is just a bunch of bat files wrapped around some free 1980s C compiler.

Answer 4

There are many factors that determine user-friendliness. Learning plays an important part. Think of Microsoft office, most people think they know how to use it. I ask my friends how many times they were struck with issues like style being set inappropriately (issues like font size, indentation). Is Microsoft office developed by software imbeciles!

Without designers who understand human psychology, the most benevolent efforts become a pain. How many times have we seen a clumsy presentations created by software engineers. Has this got to do with programming ability? No. It is just that good UI designers develop interfaces that are easily understood.

Answer 5

I would agree with you that configuring network appliances and equipment is rather a tedious and boring task.

I believe it comes down to the demand for a nice user interface. Customers demand a nice UI from consumer electronics and gamers demand pretty intuitive gaming interfaces in their games. Since network engineering probably don't complain to Cisco etc about this, it remains a lower priority.

Also, cost is another factor. A router can be configured by a network engineer such as yourself and years later may not require any more configuring. I would imagine that companies like Cisco know this, and figure that the investment into design for nice user interface tools is unnecessary. They could save a LOT of money by doing the bare minimum in the UI department.

Having said that Apple do a very nice job with the UI on their consumer wireless devices such as the Airport Extreme. The UI is an actual application that looks nice, not a web interface.

On the plus side, because networking UI's are normally difficult to use, it keeps you employed and makes your job more important (and higher paid). Remember the days when you were the only one that could build a computer? I do and not its not really a skill these days as almost any high school student can do it.

Answer 6

I think this question highlights the historical divide between telecommunication and software engineering. It is often the case that more technical matters of telecommunication cannot be hidden from their users, since those details may be required for a function set up. Furthermore, telecommunication documentation tends to be heavy on the acronyms (confusing things further).