The descent into lawsuits is pretty sad. When customers hate your product (i.e. the ADP front-end) so much that an entire company forms around making something less terrible, you really have to look at yourself in the mirror.
I continue to be amazed by the horribleness of benefits web front-ends. I recently did a simple task in our Hewitt system, and it required five pop-up windows. It's just so, so terrible.
It seems to me that being in business for 65+ years and being the undisputed market leader in an industry and then having an incredibly well funded software company with hundreds of employees siphon off only 600 of your customers isn't necessarily a moment for self reflection.
I've used ADP myself as a startup founder. Yeah the interface is annoying. So is Craigslist, whatever. That line of argument isn't necessarily dispositive, both of them have been reasonably adept at solving the problem I engaged with them to solve.
I continue to be amazed by the horribleness of benefits web front-ends. I recently did a simple task in our Hewitt system, and it required five pop-up windows. It's just so, so terrible.
ADP EZ-Labour - not so EZ, but plenty of labour. There are 20 work days in a month. There are 20 rows in the timesheet form. Every one of them has 8 drop-down boxes, and every one of them needs to be filled with your work status, project code, etc, individually. No group actions. Seriously.
What's so frustrating about benefits front-ends is just how much low-hanging fruit is sitting there uncollected. I'm not asking that ADP implement some awesome canvas-based rendering with AJAX storage and async field update - I just want a lousy 'apply all' button and maybe working tab order between the form controls. Jeebus.
Are you using it for time tracking? Would you be able to use a dedicated time-tracking tool like Toggl [0]? I'm not connected Toggl, just a happy user. It seems to have good reporting and project-granularity for timesheets, better than any I've used before.
I don't think that anyone would voluntarily use EZ-labour themselves. EZ-labour is the sort of software that you choose for OTHER people to use. In other words, Enterprise-Grade Software.
Our accounting department uses EZ-labour to keep track of our work on different projects and for registering time-off and vacation. Realistically most of us only work on one project, but accounting wants the time cards filled out anyways.
EZ-Labour is unfit for personal time-tracking. For one thing, the UI is clumsy and repetitive. If I work on one thing consistently for a week, I have 5*8 slowly updating combo box fields to enter at the end of the week.
For another thing, the work categories are defined by the accounting department, not by the users. The categories aren't useful for me - they're useful for accounting.
Also, you can't always fix errors. There's at least one bug in EZ-labour where accidentally entering hours on a weekend can't be removed.
EZ-Labour's front end could probably be improved a LOT, quite easily. But it's Enterprise-Grade Software - no one who made it is using it, no one who is buying it is using it, no one who uses it has an opportunity to fix it, and there's clearly no user-feedback being incorporated into the design. It's bad software being shovelled out by a big, dumb, blind company. That's really what characterized Enterprise-Grade Software - it's produced by a silo-ed organization and there's no opportunity for feedback and iteration, so it never gets past it's shitty v0.1 state.
The ADP front-end isn't the product. front-end is basically an admin screen, the product is the payroll actually hitting your employees bank, and its all the customer service involved if things go wrong before hitting your employees bank account.
This is why people pay them, there user interfaces are bad. However it is bad interfaces over reliable services... there competition in this case offers great interfaces over other peoples services.
Yep. Payroll is also hard in the backend. The rules differ by state and by country. I've only written very basic payroll systems and it was a PITA. The UI was the least important thing when it came to paying people properly.
> When customers hate your product (i.e. the ADP front-end) so much that an entire company forms around making something less terrible, you really have to look at yourself in the mirror.
Is this really accurate? Doesn't Zenefits exist to merge several services, only some of which ADP provide? And while many people have said that ADP's front end is bad, it seems like you've taken those claims a step further by claiming that people only pay Zenefits to avoid having to use it (rather than cross-platform integration which is their real purpose).
Would you rather have something that looks nice or actually works? Especially when it comes to nontrivial things like benefits and payroll? Don't you think it's a bit silly for you as a user to be swayed to use one thing or another by a pretty interface?
We seem to understand never to "judge a book by its cover"...except when it comes to web interfaces.
You can, but given the mixed reviews from actual Zenefits customers on here and elsewhere they aren't there yet.
I liken it to tech's war on banks. Everyone loves to make fun of the fact that banks still use "old" technology like mainframes, but when was the last time a bank went down? I will go with a old school bank over a NewCo tech bank any day when it comes to nontrivial things like storing my money.
I continue to be amazed by the horribleness of benefits web front-ends. I recently did a simple task in our Hewitt system, and it required five pop-up windows. It's just so, so terrible.