A Student Needs 16 Clicks Just to Open a PowerPoint on an iPad
It Takes 16 Clicks for a Student to Open a PowerPoint on an iPad
Teachers on r/Teachers are fed up with classroom technology after one parent counted 16 taps for a kid to open a PowerPoint on an iPad — and 17 more if the password is forgotten. The thread blames bloated edtech, Clever and Canvas login loops, and iPads built for consumption rather than creation. Suggested fixes range from QR codes and PDFs to Apple Classroom and Clever Badges.
The endless ouroboros of login verification is slowly driving me insane.
- curriculum
My employer (a large university) recently adopted a new parking portal. To pay for parking every morning, I have to open my browser, navigate to a webpage (there is no mobile app), and tap eleven times to pay for parking:
1. Tap "login", taking me to the login page.
2. Tap the "login" button on that page.
3. Sign in using 2FA. (A few more taps, but I'm not counting that against the portal).
4. Tap "Redeem Parking Permit"
5. Tap "Redeem use of Permit Pack"
6. Tap the car that I used that day (which is always the same car)
7. Tap "Confirm"
8. Tap the calendar icon to open the date chooser.
9. Tap on today's date (why isn't this the default?!)
10. Tap "Confirm"
11. Tap "Complete"
After a month or so at being annoyed by all of this unnecessary friction, I had Claude write an iOS app that keeps me logged into the parking portal. Now paying for parking requires just a single tap in my custom app. It also shows me a widget, telling me whether I have already paid or not.
I've built a lot with Claude this year, but that simple tool might be the one that brings me the most happiness.
- throwaway63467
Everything feels so cumbersome. I click on a link in some app which takes me to their login which takes me to MSFT login which takes me to the 2FA provider which asks me for a passkey which takes me back to MSFT which asks me whether to remember which takes me back to my app which forgot the redirect on the way which takes me back to the home view from which I navigate back to where I wanted to go where I can finally see what I wanted to see. Surely there must be a better way.
- temporallobe
Just to get into my development environment, I have to:
1. Log in to OKTA and choose my specific account (we have 2 accounts for some reason, and only one of them is used for development)
2. Log into AWS with that account
3. Select another sub-account in AWS
4. Navigate to my developer EC2
5. Start the instance
6. In VS Code, open a terminal and log in with “aws login —profile myName”
7. Wait for redirect to AWS in the browser window
8. Click ok and close the tab
9. Back in VS Code, open remote explorer and click on a preset that does an ssh tunnel to my workspace on the EC2
10. Wait for VS Code to spawn a new window
11. Now I can go through all of my other development setup tasks (another 6-10 steps depending on what I need to do)
Every day. And our instances force auto-shutdown at 9pm, so if you need to work late, better save your work, log off preemptively, and go through the same process.
- Miner49er
As a new parent I was surprised that schools have even gotten into a state where iPads or Chromebooks are used regularly in the classroom. I don't understand how kids can learn on them.
iPads especially, they aren't a tool for productive work. Not many people use iPads professionally - they are designed for consuming. If I was in school today I think the distractions they provide would make me a far worse student.
- phreack
I've never heard of "Clever" but it looks like that's the real problem? And some need for a Google integration. So they're making kids use two separate online services just to see a presentation! There is surely a better way, whoever is mandating these platforms has to be being bribed.
- cellu
The night before delivering my talk I thought it was a good idea to change my slides.
After an hour of work I close the deck and go to upload it on the organisers’s platform.
“Mh the file size is the same, that’s odd”.
PowerPoint on iPad did not save any change.
- baud9600
Remember when we used to write specs and we said, “the screen will respond to the user in 2 seconds or less”? I often think about that when I’m waiting for a page to load or struggling through some painful login sequence that takes waaaay longer than 2s. This is the truth in an age that talks about usability and accessibility. At the end of our days we will account for all those lost seconds and find we’ve spent weeks waiting for computers to respond. Literally wasted time and no compensation. Sad thought really
- vrmiguel
Well, that tracks.
I don't try to do any sort of "productive" work on iPhone/iPad because I simply don't know how to. Very simple file operations are often so unnecessarily complicated.