The ACM digital library and usability

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world's largest computing professionals' organisation and its digital library a repository of tens of thousands of articles from many top-flight publications in the sector. Among these publications is the industry standard 'Interactions', addressing the area of human-computer interaction and related areas such as usability.

So it's ironic that the digital library giving immediate access to all this fine material is so unusable. If you're lucky, you only get a popup logon box appearing every 5-10 minutes, and if you're unlucky - as I was yesterday - you can end up going around in circles as the system accepts your logon to access an article and then promptly throws another logon screen at you just as another part of the system has sent you half way to being able to download a paper. The obsession with security, keeping outsiders out, means that those who are members are forced to go through tortuous routines time and again.

Yesterday's little episode then led my to change passwords yet again, in a futile attempt to solve the problem, which went fine. And then I was given a link right in the centre of the page, to take me back to my original paper download page, so I clicked and got this little gem:

An error occurred while evaluating the expression:
find("CFID",want_href) EQ 0
Error near line 1833, column 40.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Error resolving parameter WANT_HREF
ColdFusion was unable to determine the value of the parameter. This problem is very likely due to the fact that either:
You have misspelled the parameter name, or
You have not specified a QUERY attribute for a CFOUTPUT, CFMAIL, or CFTABLE tag.
The error occurred while processing an element with a general identifier of (CFIF), occupying document position (1833:12) to (1833:45) in the template file F:\WWWROOT\PORTAL\V6\POPLOGIN.CFM.
Date/Time: 10/27/03 10:03:02
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Alexa Toolbar)
Remote Address: 217.134.11.50
Query String: dl=GUIDE&td=1067267175776

Phew! Should anybody really be faced by such a message as a result of clicking the main link in the centre of what must be a frequently visited page? Has anyone tested any of this stuff?

Some time ago, a manager at one major UK agency producing websites for corporates said that "usability is the Laura Ashley of computing" - all his guests laughed. My response is that systems without usability input are all too often the Ratner's* of computing.

* (For those of you outside the UK, Ratner's was a national cut-price jewellery chain, effectively killed by its chief executive when he admitted in public that one of his firm's products was "total crap").