On the importance of the user experience Aug13

On the importance of the user experience

Yesterday, after having spent many frustrating hours trying to resolve a problem with a VM I have had handed off to me, I tweeted “Wow. Cpanel is awful. O_O”. The developers, rightly, were not pleased to hear this and invited me to share with them my issues. As a strong – some might say annoyingly persistent – advocate of direct engineering/developer engagement with end users, and of the customer advocacy approach to community engagement, it would be hypocritical of me to ignore this request. Whatever I may think of Cpanel the application, developers reaching out to people they don’t follow on Twitter who evidence dissatisfaction with their product is exactly the kind of community engagement I believe in. So, rather than simply provide an angry throwaway Tweet, I am going to do something of a teardown of my encounter with Cpanel. What went wrong, what went right, what is a bias on my part and what is clearly broken. The problem environment The VM in question is a CentOS 6.x VM running CPanel 56.0.32. The VM is running on on-premises hardware, so I have console access and thus the ability to effect maintenance outside of the CPanel interface. The VM is running a VMware infrastructure, and did not appear to have VMware tools installed when I got hold of it. (This has now been remedied.) The VM has 4GB of RAM, a pair of vCPUs, and a 40GB drive that is roughly 60% full. The system is used primarily for hosting a small ecommerce site and its associated database. The system was configured by a third party and handed off to a client of mine. The client configured basic items, such as e-mail addresses, in case something goes sideways on the system. The system...