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Comment by jSully24 | Hacker News Reader

You mention not being the person making a purchasing decision, who is? Can you connect with them?

I would encourage you to put together a story that illustrates the pain being caused by this software and get with the purchasers. Not only might it help your organization figure out they need to do something different it could also show off your skills to the orgainization.

Could you collect the time you and other people are spending working on these problems? How many issues are reported to you? How many bugs you've filed and have not had fixed by the vendor? Rolling this up into a real dollar coast it's having on you and the school district users.

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> who is? Can you connect with them?

For something like this, usually at the senior executive level, and organizationally. There's not really one person making the decision, it's done through the organization's decision-making system. Nominally there's a responsible person, but practically speaking that individual isn't completely autonomous.

Large organizations have been making and dealing with decisions like this for ages, and rarely does dollar cost of usability ever influence. Products SAP and MS Teams get and retain market share by making the cost of moving off that software outweigh the gains.

The person making the decision is very like the superintendent of the school system, likely informed by someone from IT and maybe someone representing the teachers somehow.

They might listen to me if I bring in a coalition of other parents, but there's two reasons why I'm probably not going to do this:

1. They're likely locked into at least a year-long contract, if not more

2. Doing this is a huge amount of work for me. I'd have to find a significant number of parents who are _also_ as peeved as me, and then get them to take action - even if it's signing something - and then I'd have to bring the petition up to the school board, etc., etc., etc.

It's much easier to just mute the notifications on the app, and go through them once a week. 99% of them are just wildly inactionable anyway - things like reminding me that school is out, or that a student interest group that's irrelevant to me is having a meeting two Thursdays from now.

If I was annoyed enough to take action, I'd rather just offer to build them a replacement app - shorten that feedback loop, ya know?

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