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.
  • 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
  • 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.
Arena is maintained by one person. It is so difficult to get new younger staff to use it, and we all keep shortcuts and help each other, because this software is excruciatingly maddenning. It slows down all our work and does not speed up any of our functionality. We address it at the very end of our project because we have to, not because we feel this in any way makes our life easier.
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?