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Tech rant: downloading software from IBM

Was this their use case for “Developer want to download DB2 client software”?

I documented the steps it took me to do a single download from their site, and sent them an e-mail which will either be politely ignored as not understanding the complexities of their business or (at best) printed our and pinned up on their break room wall.

Summary: it took more than 48 steps (some I abbreviated into a loop) to download one file.

Here’s the e-mail.

1. find download page for IBM DB2 client software (I’ll pretend finding this was just one step, even though it wasn’t)
2. click on link to download
3. be told I need to register as an IBM.com user
4. read a page on why IBM.com account name must be an e-mail
5. enter my chosen account information
6. decode which boxes indicate I don’t want spam e-mail: first one unchecked, second one checked (tricky! you were hoping people would leave both the same and get at least 50%, weren’t you?)
7. submit new account creation request
8. be told I didn’t fill in all fields correctly… but not told which fields are wrong
9. notice that the “password” field is in red
10. enter new password
11. hit submit
12. same results as step 8
13. repeat steps 8-11 another six (yes, 6) times since your site refuses to tell me why the password I want in invalid (tip: sometimes people use very long passwords with special characters… silly people, worrying about security like that…)
14. finally learn that no special characters are allowed, and am told my account is created with my (purely alphanumeric) password choice
15. go back to my download page
16. enter my account credentials
17. be told they’re invalid… ?
18. read a page that says it might take a few minutes for account to become active
19. wait a few minutes
20. enter account credentials again
21. be told they’re still invalid…
22. Go to “change password” page
23. notice I need an existing, valid password to change my password… this won’t work for me
24. go to “forgot my password” page
25. answer my security question (whew! fortunately my answer used no special characters and wasn’t too long)
26. choose a new, shorter password with no special characters, since apparently even though the account creation form allowed me to use a long password (> 32 characters), the login page doesn’t and was rejecting my credentials
27. go back to download page
28. login (yay!), expecting to get to download page at last
29. instead get form asking why I want to download the softrware(!?), who I am within my company (hint: none of your choices really fit me anyway), and asking if I want to be on your e-mail lists… yeah, the same lists I already told you about when I created my account 30.) submit answers to your required survey
30. get to donwload page

Hooray! I can finally download the software I want! Or can I…?

1. choose software I want
2. click “download”
3. get warning screen telling me Download Director or Java was disabled (neither is the case)
4. notice separate screen asking for permission to install a Java applet
5. install applet
6. click “try again” on download screen – but nothing happens
7. close new download window, go back to original page, click “download” link again
8. choose a location to download the file… since the applet can’t use my browser preference
9. watch java applet crash all of firefox
10. restart firefox
11. relogin to IBM.com
12. click download on software i want
13. re-specify my download location
14. wait for Java to start
15. begin download

And while I’m sure your “Download Director” is a fine piece of Java programming, nearly all of your features (resume, pause, restart, and queue downloads) are already handled quite nicely by Firefox’s download manager…

Anyhow, while waiting for the download to finish, so figured one or two more steps couldn’t hurt:

1. write up my process and send to IBM in hopes that someone, somewhere, can make this process less painful (but let’s be honest: your marketing and sales folks want all the info they can get so they can make more sales, right?)
2. post same e-mail on my blog, so others know how difficult it is to get software freely available to the world meant for developers to connect their programs to your databases