HCI For the Broadhop Subscriber Manager

First, I must apologize for the lack of screen shots, I cannot post the screen shots as there is sensitive information on the pages.  At a customer site, I utilize the Broadhop subscriber manager.  The subscriber manager provides and ISP with the ability to manage subscriber options for various ISP tasks.  The system allows the administrators to define information such as the user account information for the subscribers (user name, password, etc).  In addition, because the ISP provides multiple services, the Broadhop subscriber manger defines various locations and devices for the administrator.

The user interface is very confusing for the Subscriber manager.  First, the administrator needs to define the service levels for the on one 'tab' in the user interface.  The service level is used to define various components in the system such as the upload/download speed, access to resources and error pages.  From there, the administrator defines the locations (or towns in this case).  In each of the towns the administrator needs to define the service levels (defined in the first step) available in the town.  Finally, the user needs to define the network devices that are in each town and the subnets that belong in the town.

Although the management is through a web interface, there are a number of issues that make the interface difficult to manage.  First, there are links on the location page for the various services available, but the links do not take the administrator to the management or definition of the service.  This does not seem like a huge deal until there are several hundred (as is the case for my customer) service levels defined with almost one hundred different locations.  The list of services is provided via a sorted list in a tree view (one tree node for each service level with device specific information underneath each).  This seems like an acceptable user interface, until the administrator updates a service level.  When the user performs an update, the entire page is refreshed (causing the focus to be on the top of the page versus keeping the configuration where the administrator previously had focus.  Collapsing the tree levels is only effective until the page is refreshed (every refresh keeps expands all trees nodes).

Next, there are many locations where lists are provided, but the list is not sorted.  For example, when defining services for a subscriber (the level of service they have), the administrator must first define the location (which is provided as a list of around one-hundred different towns for my customer) in an unsorted list.  This means that an administrator must start at the top of the list reading each of the items until the correct town is located.  Then, the administrator is provided with a list of services (for that one location) and that list is also not sorted.  Fortunately, there are only about ten different services per location at this customer.  The frustrating thing is there are other lists (such as when the administrator is adding services to a location) that are sorted correctly.  So, this appears to be a case of HCI oversight.