Is it just me or is the Customer Portal a bit of a usability nightmare?
Since this is only used infrequently, it is important that it is intuitive and all features are "in your face". I find that I can never find features that I'm sure are there and I used before. In particular I pent about half an hour trying to find the email management features and in the end had to come to this forum for tips and confirmation that it actually existed!
In my view there are two problems:
1. Too many different types of navigation are used i.e. toolbar, menu, buttons, drop-down lists etc. and typically a feature is only available by one route. I was not seeing the drop-down list at the top of the tools and features page - it is tiny compared to other features on the page when you have a high resolution screen.
3. There is too much back and forth to the server with small, sparsly populated pages and features deaply nested. A dose of Web2.0 and a flattening of the page hierarchy is called for! To get an idea of what I mean, try changing the spam settings (or even viewing the spam settings) on five mailboxes. I hate to think what it must be like for a business customer with a few hundred!
Is this just me or does anyone agree?