Dear Intuit,

Wonder why so many mac users hate you? Here it is in a single screen shot:

I love to collect bad user interfaces. This one comes from Quicken 2004 for the Macintosh and represents just about the biggest “fuck you” to all things Macintosh.

I know that we all hate paying our Quicken and TurboTax tax for upgrades of dubious quality, but how did this dialog box pass the QA and CS¹ departments?

Let’s see, the buttons say “Yes/No” so that means I have to read the dialog box. How about “Schedule” and “Never Schedule” instead? I’m also asked to “Cancel” but how is that different from “No”? Also, look at the extra actions: “Exclude this payee from future bill matches” and “Stop checking for bills” Think of all the permutations and how does one confirm this? For instance, what happens if I check “Stop checking for bills” and then hit “Cancel”? The user interface is so bad, that Quicken has to include in small text what clicking “Yes” is actually going to do.

I’ve owned/used Quicken since Quicken 4.0 on the Mac which is a lot longer than almost anyone. Back then, Intuit would send you Quicken by mail and you could get a refund and keep the diskettes and manual. One thing I miss from the Windowification of the Mac software is that they somehow adopt some of the stupidest Windows conventions: the Yes/No/Cancel dialog box has got to be the worst, followed closely by the “try to fit 100 actions in a single one.” I’m not asking for a universal menu bar here or “windows belongs to applications”—I’m asking for some common sense. Does a dialog box really need me to spend 10 minutes contemplating what it is going to do every time I see it?

Quicken is littered with these dialog boxes.

This is why Word 6 sucked. This is why Quicken continues to suck. Oh yeah the reviewers will say that Word 6 was “slow” on the Mac and that Quicken doesn’t offer anything new, but really it is these things that litter our daily use that seep through our subconcious and eventually make us Microsoft or Intuit² haters.

Yes, I’m ranting because it is the hundredth time I’ve hit the wrong combinations of checkboxes and buttons on this dialog. I then spent thirty seconds of my life that I’ll never get back trying to figure what happened and trying to recover from it.