2008 IEEE Membership Renewal
I’ve been an IEEE member since 1993. I’m not sure why I renew every year, and have seriously considered dropping my membership each year for the last few, as it doesn’t seem to serve my career in any significant way.
I’m not interested in the researchy articles. Some of the practical overviews are good references. However the main issue I have is that the IEEE has yet to figure out how to make their services convenient for people who don’t want to receive print magazines and journals. These dead-tree publications take up space and I’ll read maybe 1 of 50 articles, if that.
What I want is electronic access to the 1-2% of the articles I would like to read. The IEEE has had a version of online access to articles for years, but it has been inconvenient and clunky. The basic problem they have never solved is making it easy for a reader to quickly get access to just the articles they want.
Here’s a free idea for the IEEE. Set up an RSS feed for each magazine. Allow anyone to subscribe to the feed, even if they are not a magazine subscriber or even an IEEE member. The feed will provide the article title, authors and abstract. Clicking on the feed entry will take you to a web page that allows you to download the article, if you are a legit subscriber, or asks you to pay for it if you are not. Seems like a no-brainer. Web startups do this sort of thing all the time. Why can’t a gigantic organization like the IEEE?
I digress…
In any case, my membership renewal papers arrive in the mail the other day. So I go online to renew. In the past, this process has been relatively painless. This year I wanted to change over to 100% electronic access, so I can stop throwing out all of the print copies I keep getting in the mail.
But I find that I cannot log into the site, even with what I know is the right userid and password. Turns out that the site doesn’t support Firefox. That’s a big no-no in 2007. So I switch to Internet Explorer and get in.
Next I try to update my profile to indicate my new job, employer, and so on. But when I go to do so, the site causes IE to spawn iterative copies of itself. Within seconds I have 20 IE windows launched, and counting. I kill IE from the task manager and try again a couple of times with the same outcome. So I scrap changing the profile.
On to the business of getting switching over to electronic-only delivery. I pick out a few magazines I’d like to receive in electronic format. They go into my cart along with the membership renewal. I check out…but no, my cart is invalid. The site doesn’t tell me why, it just won’t let me check out. I mess around for a while, finally just deleting everything but my membership renewal and trying again. If the items themselves are invalid or if they require being combined with other items, the site should tell me AS I put them into my cart not AFTER they are already in my cart and I’m trying to check out.
I vaguely remember that some magazines are part of memberships to particular societies, such as the communications or computer societies. So I go to add a couple of society memberships. But there are no options for electronic-only society memberships. If you join a society, it appears that you have to receive a dead-tree version of all of the associated literature, even if each individual magazine has an electronic-only option (though I can’t seem to check out with electronic-only anything).
All of this messing around is taking time. Even on Thanksgiving Day, when you’d expect minimal traffic, the site is slow with pages often taking 20-30 seconds to load. Wasting time is something I’m just not going to do. So I choose the renewal and the society memberships with print and electronic access, and vow to recycle everything the IEEE sends me in print.
I don’t need to explain how e-commerce sites like Amazon have been making product selection and shopping cart management easy for years and years. This was a case of me, the customer, knowing exactly what I wanted but being unable to purchase it. Various emails as well as literature that came with my renewal package had implied that I could choose electronic-only subscriptions. The site even allowed me to choose electronic-only subscriptions, but I couldn’t complete the renewal with them in my cart.
The IEEE is an engineering society. Apparently the organization doesn’t practice what it preaches about software engineering and usability engineering. Their site and its renewal process is one of the most poorly designed I’ve been subjected to in quite a while. Even some early-stage web startups have done a better job making it easy for the customer to get in and out of their service, so it is not a matter of manpower - it is a matter of design, development, and testing.
Frankly, the site is barely beta quality and has several obvious bugs. If I were in charge of the it and was presented with it as it stands today, I’d fire the developers, or at least send them back to square one.
November 25th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
I’ve been a member of the IEEE for over 30 years. In those years, the IEEE has provided me support in learning about new technology, access to services / products and directly supporting my career. As you probably already know, engineering jobs come and go. Most jobs are found by networking. If you are happy in your current job and only using the IEEE as a source of technical magazines, then you are missing out on the most important benefit, the chance to meet people beyond your current company. As a member, you have access to over 370,000 other engineers and thousands of companies that can employ you should your job situation change. If you are not networking through IEEE meetings, conferences, discussion groups and volunteering efforts; then your exposure to the world is limited. Other professions (lawyers, accountants, etc.) understand the value of networking. For some reason, engineers of all types don’t get the fact that you need to be prepared beyond your current situation. My advice to you is to renew and then start participating beyond just reading the magazines. I’ve forwarded your experience about renewing to the proper person at the IEEE. They will check the renewal process and change things. In the meantime, if you don’t make use of the IEEE Network then you are all alone in the world if things change at work.
Lee
l.stogner@ieee.org
November 25th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Lee, thanks for your comments. I’m pretty active in networking, just not through the IEEE. No particular reason why, but I keep my calendar full otherwise. Anyway, my points are the web site being hard to use and having better access to electronic-only versions of publications. Anything the IEEE could do to improve those areas would be a plus.