One time a few years ago I was contracted to redesign a large Mercedes dealership's website.
They recommended IE6 too but the main issue wasn't what the user saw when visiting the page, it was the supplier CMS used to administrate it. This was enforced by Mercedes themselves, so all dealerships had to use it.
It was custom, and, this is no exaggeration, impossible to use. There was probably a 600 page manual, caked in dust in some forgotten supply cupboard, detailing what exactly you had to do after you'd managed the Herculean task of logging in.
Editing a simple block of text required 'unlocking' it, which would for some reason lock other elements. And then when you did change the text it might not have let you save it anyway, providing plenty of incomprehensible error messages.
I must have put a mental block on the rest because I quit after just a day of figuring it out, but my guess is that pages like that still exist because no bugger can figure out how to edit them.
I'd be surprised if VW didn't use the same or a similar CMS themselves.
This sounds like the most common reaction to users accidentally causing errors in data: lock everything down and only allow a very specific operation, and complain loudly and specifically (i.e., incomprehensibly) if they get out of line, in order to protect the data. Did someone find a new way to screw up? Add another restriction.
I sometimes wonder why these interfaces are so freaking common for anything not facing the general public.
Yep and sites like this get the back button treatment if they're public sites, but you don't know about it until you start working there when it's intranet crud.
They recommended IE6 too but the main issue wasn't what the user saw when visiting the page, it was the supplier CMS used to administrate it. This was enforced by Mercedes themselves, so all dealerships had to use it.
It was custom, and, this is no exaggeration, impossible to use. There was probably a 600 page manual, caked in dust in some forgotten supply cupboard, detailing what exactly you had to do after you'd managed the Herculean task of logging in.
Editing a simple block of text required 'unlocking' it, which would for some reason lock other elements. And then when you did change the text it might not have let you save it anyway, providing plenty of incomprehensible error messages.
I must have put a mental block on the rest because I quit after just a day of figuring it out, but my guess is that pages like that still exist because no bugger can figure out how to edit them.
I'd be surprised if VW didn't use the same or a similar CMS themselves.