With the invention of the personal computer came a realization in our society: technology can make our lives better. But I believe we’ve lost sight of this realization, and  tools have gotten more bloated and less helpful.

Technology was supposed to increase productivity. For example, during the Industrial Revolution, inventions such as the Spinning Jenny revolutionized the process of spinning yarn, and increased the production rates tremendously.

Now, we’ve come a long way from the Spinning Jenny, but with our enormous improvements in technology we’ve lost sight of the original purpose of said technology: to increase the productivity of our jobs, and to make our lives better.

IT departments are notorious for hopelessly losing sight. My dad demonstrated for me a web application his employer is forcing him to use to manage the hiring process. The interface is so buggy, convoluted and badly designed that it takes up to 35 clicks just to look at a resume and decline it.

This is an example of how technology has failed. The task of sorting though hundreds of paper resumes was simple when it only took 5 – 30 seconds to scan and make a decision for each resume. The employer could take a stack of 200 and be done with a shortlist in under an hour.

But with this new system, which is supposed to revolutionize how hiring works, each resume takes approximately two minutes to scan and act upon. The shortlisting of candidates has gone from under an hour to a full day’s work.

Which brings me to my point. Technology is here to make our lives better and more productive, so why are we making technology that sucks?

We need to ask some critical questions before we dive in to a new software suite or application.

• Does this tool make the job easier?
• Will this tool save us time?
• Can we be more efficient and/or precise by using this tool?

If we can answer “yes” to all of these questions, then using the new technology can be justified and will be worth it in the end.

An example of technology done well is WordPress (as well as other CMSs, but WordPress being the easiest and most prominent). WordPress took a platform that was only available to web developers or tech-savvy people and presented it in a way that the every-day computer user could understand. They took a complicated task (writing code) and made it as simple as clicking a few buttons and typing.

Not only that, but they then allowed for anyone to publish their work, allowing for small, budding writers to get their work out to the masses as easily and cost-effective as possible.

It’s technology like WordPress that we need more of: tools and technology that help us preform tasks easier than we could do them before. We need to stop making software and tools like the HR application that made a simple task labourious and tedious.

If we can remember what technology is supposed to do for us, then we will all benefit from it. If technology can actually make our lives better, and not just make us look cooler, that will be when the best innovations are born.