Never Buy Version 1.0 (Harshaw Rule 1), Mypyramidtracker.com (Revised)

Revised April 23:
Apparently the system is working now. I'm a little dubious of the site as far as usability goes, but I always think I could do things better so disregard this sentence.

Comment April 22:
As if any further confirmation of Harshaw Rule 1 was needed, USDA released a new Website to support its new food pyramids. The idea is to provide personalized advice based on age and body mass index, with the further option of recording your food intake and exercise day by day. Nice idea, but insufficiently tested and supported. In a word, they underestimated the interest. Big mistake, because anyone turned off this week is unlikely to return.

I signed up for the food/exercise option and found the site working slowly earlier in the week. This morning I tried to login again and got an error message that a user should never get. To quote part of it:

The viewstate is invalid for this page and might be corrupted.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Such a message should be intercepted and a more user-friendly message supplied instead. Contacted support, which was a hassle itself (the error message window should have a mailto link there) and got two responses, explaining that they were overloaded and I'd probably have to re-sign up. It's good I didn't spend much time recording what I usually eat and do or I'd be really angry.

User testing is one of my pet peeves, maybe this will trigger more blogging on the subject.