A phone app. A freaking phone app.

[MineralMan]

This morning, I saw an iPhone with the Iowa caucus phone app on it on the CBS Morning News. Its owner, who looked to be in his 60s, was holding it. He was the one who was supposed to report results from one caucus. It didn't work. It didn't fail to work because he was older and didn't know how to use it. It failed to work because it failed to work.

He caught the app's failure early, before results were in. Also early, he called the Democratic Party hotline set up for caucus leaders to report the problem. He was told not to worry, and to call in the results when they were available. He said he tried, but could never get through when he did.

A phone app. I have a smart phone myself. It has a bunch of apps installed on it, some of which I use regularly. It has had many other apps on it that I tried and then deleted because they didn't work properly or had user interface problems.

Apps are great, They're something that the millennial generation has been working hard on and promoting to cell phone users. It appears that there was no training offered to caucus leaders who were supposed to use the app. Apparently, there was no test of the app that involved those caucus users prior to the actual caucus.

I love my Android apps. At least, I love the ones that work every time I use them. I use my Yahoo Mail app to check my email when I'm not at my desk. It works, but often a new email comes in but doesn't show up for a couple of hours, after I've already read it and replied to it on my desktop PC. The app works, but not all that well.

The Iowa Caucus app failed to work on the only occasion when it was supposed to work. No training. No thorough testing in an actual simulation by all caucus leaders at the same time. So, it failed and we have the debacle that is the 2020 Iowa caucus.

I love technology, but only when it works. Apps are great, but they don't always work. That's why a reliable backup plan is essential. In Iowa, the backup call-in plan didn't work either. Nothing worked, and we still don't have the complete results of the Iowa caucus.

So, millennial app designers, don't assume that your cool app with its cool UX design will just work when it needs to work. Training and thorough testing are needed if you're going to prevent disasters. Apps are cool. The Iowa caucus app wasn't cool. It sucked!

[Hoyt]

1. Not our best management display. Embarrassing.

[MineralMan]

3. Beyond embarrassing.

It was a total failure. The people who created the app were incompetent at what they do. Truly incompetent. The job the app had to do was pretty simple, really. But it failed totally.

It's not just embarrassing. It was a complete disaster, and the backup plan didn't work either, because it wasn't tested any better than the app was tested.

Fail all around.

[cwydro]

2. Lol! My thoughts exactly!

Why wouldn’t they have done a test run? A simulation? A stress test? Something, anything.

A debacle indeed.

[MineralMan]

4. I had a small software company of my own, years ago.

I designed small Windows applications that did a single thing that was difficult to do in larger, more comprehensive apps. One of my apps made it easy for people to design business cards and print them on the nice business card stock Avery and some other companies sold. It was called "Rockford," after the TV show, where the main character occasionally printed business cards on a small printing press in the trunk of his car. It was my best-selling Windows application.

I marketed it as shareware. People would try it out and some of them paid me for it. Not many, but some. I made a few thousand dollars a year from it. I was the whole company. I wrote the software, packaged it, shipped it, swept the floor, and cleaned the restroom. I was responsible for that piece of software.

The first version had some minor bugs and didn't work perfectly on all printers. People told me about the problems, and I fixed them and sent them a patched version. The program went through four release versions over several years, each one better than the previous one. The design part of the program was used to create some other programs, like a label-printing program, called MultiLabel, that let you design and print labels on any Avery label format or even on custom label stock. You could print whole pages of the same label or labels from a database within the program or your own data imported into the program. That program sold well, too, and filled a niche in the Windows software world.

I describe this because creating software is a difficult job. Debugging and creating new versions is also a difficult job, as is customer support and much, much more. I did all of those things for my tiny little software company. What I didn't do was ship the software without doing thorough testing of it before releasing it. That doesn't mean there weren't bugs, but I fixed them as they were discovered by my customers.

Writing apps is hard. Making sure they work when they're needed is hard, too, but it's an essential part of the process. Testing is hard, too, because if you wrote the app, you know how to use it. End users don't always know how the app works, and do unanticipated things. When that happens, you fix what caused them problems and correct them as well in the next version.

The Iowa Caucus app failed the only time it was used. Uff da!