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by Knacker_Hughes
5978 days ago
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This is a long-standing argument of mine. Some of our users maintain that they are only interested in the functionality rather than the quality of the code/design/integration etc. Then, six months later, when they need an enhancement and find that it is going to take twice as long/cost twice as much to build something on top of the quick & hacky solution that they originally insisted on, they still make unhappy noises. - I love them really, like pets... |
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One thing that I struggle with to always keep in mind is that our users are not stupid people. I keep the image of my father in my head -- an incredibly brilliant man who taught me everything I know about arithmetic by the time I was 5, algebra by the time I was 8, then stepped back as I voraciously consumed all of the math books he bought for me, thereby basically ensuring my current success in my current field -- and he can't remember how to send links to websites to his friends. Actually, it's not that he can't remember, it's that he can't decide on the best way, between IMing, or posting on Facebook, or emailing (and if he emails, will he email the link or the HTML itself, and then will it be just the HTML, or a web archive, and will the web archive work for his brother who has always ran Apple hardware, etc. etc.).
Our users aren't dumb, for the most part. It's absolutely our failure as an industry to hold each other to a standard of professionalism (and I mean professionalism in the sense of Engineers, not MBAs) to ensure that things are actually usable and adhering to standards. We were cursed by our early adoption by counter culturalists.