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"Your users do not "love" your software. Your users are temporarily tolerating your software because it's the least horrible option they have -- for now -- to m
by samspot 14y ago
"Your users do not "love" your software. Your users are temporarily tolerating your software because it's the least horrible option they have -- for now -- to meet some need."
This is the hardest lesson, and what I need to remember most. As a developer I really do like to tinker with new software (most of the time), but as a rule users do not and we had best not forget it!
I knew the firefox updates annoyed me but I had no idea they bothered the general population just as much. I actually switched to chrome because of the memory leak in firebug so I didn't have quite the same experience.
- goostavos 14y agoI recently slammed into this as well. I'm am far from being a "real" developer, but I do occasionally write software for work on my own time. I spent a couple of weeks laying out a simple gui and getting all the pieces to work. I then "released" it to the office, and after seeing people clumsily poke through the menus, I decided that they must have been laid out poorly. So I rearranged everything, and redid a lot of the graphics, and swapped the versions without telling anyone. I received a crap storm of negative feedback. Ended up having to write a guide for how to use everything, and then still didn't learn my lesson! I thought X would function way better if combined with Y, etc, etc.. Pushed another version with some new features and some feature removed, and again, a torrent of confused coworkers asking me where things went. The only good decision I made was to stop messing with it... which is hard. Each time I see people interact with it I feel there is a glaringly obvious change that needs to be made to ultimately benifit the user. But alas, I leave it be.
- samspot 14y agoYou can mitigate a lot of this with budget usability testing (show your mom :)).