(Un)usability of Promotion Management

[nscheaffer]

There seems to be a lot of talk recently around the user experience and usability across SAP suite of software products.  There is even a site dedicated to this topic...

https://experience.sap.com/

The focus seems to be on providing tools to make the end user's experience with dashboards, reports, mobile apps, etc. more intuitive and friendly.  A post titled Making Good on the UX Promise lists all sort of new things such as tools, processes and personas to make this happen.

That is all well and good, but how about applying some of innovation and resources to make the tools we BI administrators, universe designers, report designers, etc. use all the time?  Rather than creating some new tool that does something amazing how about fixing a tool like Promotion Management to be minimally functional?  What's wrong with it you ask?  There is so much wrong with it is hard to quantify.  Here are a few items...

• When trying to add objects to be promoted there is no hourglass or indication that it is working while trying to navigate folders.  Same thing when sorting.  Ideally, navigation would be near instantaneous so an hourglass would not be necessary.
• After scheduling a job the Status will be updated from "Running" to "Success", but the last run date and time won't get updated for another few seconds.
• Nearly every other screen in the Central Management Console the refresh button is near the upper right corner.  Within Promotion Management the refresh button is near the upper left corner.
• It can be very slow.  Promoting 15 reports from one environment to another took me about 45 minutes last week and most of that time (75%) was just adding the objects.

Certainly none of these are major items.  It would be frivolous and fruitless to open a support ticket about not getting an hourglass while waiting for a process.  However, collectively these items (among others) make for a tool this is severely lacking in usability which doesn't inspire confidence in me.  I know that Promotion Management is not a tool that is going to be included in a salesperson slide deck for their next sales call, but that is no excuse for abandoning good design and usability principles.

Anyone else experiencing frustrations with Promotion Manager?  Don't tell me to upgrade to the latest service pack & patch and maybe it will be better.  We just updated to 4.1 SP01 Patch 2 ten days ago and these issues persist.

Thanks,

Noel Scheaffer