Tribal Vision's SITS software for academic institutions, (also know as e:Vision) is with out doubt the worst software solution I've ever had the misfortune to encounter.
If there's anyone out there thinking about getting SITS, then don't. Get a decent development team and write something that actually does what your organisation needs in a modern 21st century way. I suspect SITS/e:Visions success is largely due to IT managers simply choosing SITS because other colleges are using it. Or maybe Tribal's sales people are simply amazing. Truth is it does nothing very clever, but appears to have no competitors and so hasn't evolved with the rest of the software industry.
SITS costs a fortune and you have to build most of it yourself… which they sell as an e:Vision feature; “It can do anything with it's HTML interface“. Well quite. Yet even this has horrible restraints, which come back to it's 1970s database design (8 character field names anyone), and it's hopeless interface. Even it's technical documentation is shoddy, and the Tribal people I encountered were years away from concepts like OOP, APIs and entity-relationship models…
….. Anyway, thankfully I don't deal with it directly anymore, however it's awfulness is leaking onto the
websites I'm working on. The list of things wrong with SITS is long but one thing that really grates me now is its total lack of anything approaching a nice “user experience”.
But then user experience is a tricky thing to quantify, how does someone say, no that screen design is not good enough? What's intuitive for one person isn't necessarily intuitive for another, there need to be some recognisable metrics to.
Thankfully work has been done on this, the links below offer some examples. There's a fair amount of work involved in getting the data required to do proper analysis but it could be worth it if it saves people time and gets them to where you want to be on your site.
Metrics for Heuristics: Quantifying User Experience (Part 1 of 2)
Metrics for Heuristics: Quantifying User Experience (Part 2 of 2)
Also