Arena: Not ready for the 20s or the 10s, better for the 90s on Windows 3.1
March 01, 2020

Arena: Not ready for the 20s or the 10s, better for the 90s on Windows 3.1

Milan Shah | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Arena

Arena is used to serve as the engineering library of all parts, software and hardware which we use for every aspect of work.

Pros

  • Serve as a Library store of information
  • Upload files and forget they are there
  • Search through super complex terminology as if it were 1993 on an old Windows 3.1 interface

Cons

  • Search is so awful I prefer Excite, Web Crawler, or Yahoo from 1994.
  • Finding anything requires a degree in Arena search terminology.
  • Attaching a file is not simply add a file, it's a group of dropdown menus. Why has any person use this? This is only for paid Arena search specialists.
  • Development time has slowed so much Arena is now the last piece, a few weeks after software has reached our users.
  • We only have it because it was always used.
  • Once the user who maintains it retires within a year, I hope there are no plans to continue using this archaic piece of infinite dropdown hell.
  • Prior Experience with the Product
There is exactly one person who is the Arena expert. Most likely they attended paid user education. If it is this difficult to search, add, or find our own data, then we need to stop wasting time paying people in our organization to specialize in this archaic piece of software.
Logz.io is a data visualizer. Although difficult to learn, it is incredibly intuitive for new users, but has extraordinary power for the experienced or advanced users. SEARCH IS MASSIVELY EASY. It does not take a paid expert in Logz.io to use it. In contrast, Arena has continued to not evolve. In the full year we have used it, no update has been conveyed. No changes in user interface, user experience, or search has made its way across. In order to find software, we have to use 3 dropdown menus. We may as well be using a yahoo list created circa 1994. Once we use dropdowns, we simply are given an unfiltered list. This then has to be searched for relevance of what we need.
Arena is great for management to believe in a place to store information. This can be quickly forgotten, and never used or found again. Here's how we currently search for software: Type in 6* and search for all, then scroll through 200 items to find your result. If you click into something, you can't click back out, you have to start the search again. Has no one in Arena used google? Or, stepped out of Arena search since 1990 on a Windows 3.1 DX computer?

Comments

  • Kraig Clark | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Kraig Clark
    (Vendor Representative) commented 6 years ago
    Milan — I appreciate your sense of humor and relate to your feedback about the user interface. So does Arena. As such, we have been working VERY hard to address it! Do you like the new user interface? It rolled out in mid January, and so far we have received very positive feedback on the changes. People enjoy the new colors, icons, and formatting, and appreciate the collapsed menus that reduce visual clutter and creates vertical space. On a down note, we received a number of requests for increased visual contrast, which we will be addressing in our next release. Arena does a major release every few months. We announce the features included within each release via email, login screen adds, webinars, the Help system, Release Notes, and through conversations we have with Arena Champions, stakeholders and users like yourself. I have worked with your colleagues, but haven't met you yet. If you would like to discuss the improvements we are working on (simpler workflows, searchable drop-downs, drag & drop file uploads, etc.), please email me at kclark@arenasolutions.com. I would be happy to schedule time with you.

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