Because the people who use the SIS most - teachers and front office staff - didn't choose it. Administrators evaluate features and compliance. Teachers evaluate whether they can take attendance in under a minute and enter grades without reading a manual.

Low usability doesn't just frustrate users. It produces bad data. Teachers who find the gradebook painful maintain a separate spreadsheet and enter grades into the SIS only when forced to. Attendance submitted late because the interface is confusing means the front office is calling families about absences that were already resolved. Every usability failure creates downstream work.

Three practical tests during evaluation:

• The attendance test. Ask the rep to take attendance for a class of 25 students. Count the clicks and the seconds. If it takes more than 45 seconds, teachers will dread it.
• The new-teacher test. Ask: how long does it take a new hire to be productive in the platform without help? If the answer involves a training manual, that's a UX problem.
• The mobile test. Open the teacher view on a phone. If it doesn't work well on mobile, half the use cases teachers care about are already broken.

Easy gradebooks let teachers enter grades for an entire assignment in one view, apply weights and categories without navigating away, and see running averages update in real time. The workflow matches how teachers think about grading: one assignment at a time, across a roster of students.

Difficult gradebooks force teachers to navigate per-student (click into student, enter grade, save, go back, click next student) or require multi-step configuration before entering a single grade. If teachers need training to use the gradebook, the gradebook is the problem.

Yes. Schools that involve at least one teacher in the evaluation process report significantly smoother adoption after launch. Teachers ask different questions than administrators during demos - they notice friction in the daily workflows administrators rarely see.

The minimum: bring a teacher to at least one demo. Better: have a teacher and a front-office staff member both evaluate their specific workflows. Best: form a small evaluation committee that includes one person from each role that uses the SIS daily.

Every SIS vendor claims ease of use. The difference is whether the claim holds up when a teacher opens the platform on their own for the first time. Alma's approach is to make the most common workflows - attendance, gradebook, family messaging - obvious without training.

The most credible test isn't a marketing claim. It's bringing a teacher to the demo and watching their reaction. Schools that have done this consistently say the gap between Alma and legacy platforms is visible in minutes.