Lazycoder

The State of Software Development today

Users vs. Developers ~ Chris Pirillo: “”

I haven’t posted much lately because I’ve been a little depressed about the current state of software. I attended a workshop for a particular piece of software that solves a BIG problem in the clinical research area. What I saw could in no way be considered a 1.0 product. The product actually DISPLAYED the primary key integer when it created a new row and EXPECTED YOU TO REMEMBER THIS WHEN YOU NEEDED TO REFER TO IT ON LATER DATA ENTRY SCREENS. That was so wack-ass I had to capitalize the almost the entire sentence. That wasn’t the depressing part, the depressing part was that when I suggested that maybe the select boxes should display the human readable names of the particular entry rather than just a 100+ item list of integers THE DEVELOPERS PUSHED BACK SAYING IT WASN’T NECESSARY. “Why would the user try to enter that directly? They can just search for the protocol and then enter the specimen data after they’ve searched for it.”. The main problem with that scenario, which I politely pointed out to them, was that if a user was entering 25 different specimens for the same protocol they would have to perform the same search 25 times OR write down the integer and put it on a sticky note to their monitor. They just didn’t get it. There were a few other problems, and by few I mean enough to choke a horse. Anytime you entered a new user you were redirected back to the main admin page. Which meant three more clicks to get back and enter another user.

Then I see Chris Pirillo’s post about “standing up for user rights” and I get a little more dismayed. Chris feels that he, as a power users, isn’t being listened to by Microsoft. His story isn’t unique. You can hear it if you wander the halls of any large corporation and ask the users about the internally developed software they have to use every day. Heck, I bet if you asked some Microsoft PMs and execs they would probably tell you the same thing. There are a TON of new and old developers that just don’t understand how to design software for users.

What can we, developers who actually care about the user experience, do? Try to step outside of yourself when you try out your new sparkly interface. Does it get in your way or out of your way? Watch how real humans actually USE your interface. Formalized user interface testing isn’t always necessary, you can get a pretty good idea of where the pain points are just by watching someone. Listen to what the users say they want to do and look at what they ACTUALLY do during their normal workflow. Sometimes they are two different things.