The ever-popular interface-palm
I’m debating whether I should feel any empathy for this situation:
Lacking a program manager, your garden-variety super-smart programmer is going to come up with a completely baffling user interface that makes perfect sense IF YOU’RE A VULCAN (cf. git). The best programmers are notoriously brilliant, and have some trouble imagining what it must be like not to be able to memorize 16 one-letter command line arguments. These programmers then have a tendency to get attached to their first ideas, especially when they’ve already written the code.
One of the best things a program manager can add to the software design process is a second opinion as to how things should be designed, hopefully one that is more empathetic to those RETARDED USERS with their pesky mental feebleness requiring that an application be usable without reading the man page, writing a custom emacs-lisp function, or translating numbers into octal in your head.
The over/under here, I think, depends on how closely the users come to being Actually Retarded. We have people on our storefront who can’t even get their names into the form correctly, and they’re not about to waste their valuable time reading anything so silly as mere documentation.
(Via TJIC.)
fillyjonk »
15 April 2009 · 9:05 am
I’m sure it’s a jargon/familiarity issue, in part. (That is, provided the end-users aren’t either genuinely stupid or have so convinced themselves that they are that they freak out when asked to turn the machine on).
I’m sure the people who write IRS forms are CONVINCED that their instructions are clear and easy to understand. And I’m sure doctors get frustrated explaining what heredity and hereditary diseases are to people who don’t remember their high school biology, if they even had genetics as part of it. And I find myself having to remind myself “Back up, these beginning students don’t necessarily know the definition of the five terms you just tossed out in the last three sentences.”
How to Win Friends and Influence Programmers « Psssst! Over Here! »
15 April 2009 · 9:39 am
[...] Via Dustbury. [...]
Jeff Brokaw »
15 April 2009 · 9:44 am
I especially liked the line “What else do you need? A tiara?” ;-)