What the customer needed..

It's pretty much inconceivable if you work in software that you haven't seen this picture posted up in your lunch room at some point. It is of course a witty look at why the software process doesn't always produce the expected functionality in the most elegant and economical fashion. Depicted are a variety of parties that must share the blame for how the end product differs from what the customer needs.

For the most part it's a reflection on communication and how personal perceptions lead to differing end results. However, when I look at it, the most striking point, and the one that I feel is most overlooked, is that the customer's description and what they needed (first and last panels) are subtly, but distinctly different. This I feel is the problem with lots of software design - the customer does have a concept, a feeling, for what the software should do, but finding a customer who can vocalize this into specific functionality rarely, if ever, happens. Turning to the customer to provide feature lists or functionality is an easier way out than stepping back and making a decision about the business problem that is being solved. What does the customer really need? What do the potential customers I have yet to sell to really need? How can I quickly, economically build that, and not get sidetracked into other features that are affiliated but take away from my concentration on the main business problem?

You shouldn't notice good design

Sometimes software design and data visualizations wow us with their grace and beauty. I would argue though, for most of the time, we don't even notice when something just works in the way it should. Quick example - if you have multiple tabs open in Google's Chrome browser and you close a tab using the x on the tab, the next tab slides across and places the next x right under your mouse, so that you quickly can close the next as well.  But here's the great thing - if you have lots of tabs open so that they have been squeezed up, and close multiple tabs, it will wait before resizing the tab so that you can continue to close tabs without moving the mouse

Firefox sort of does this except when it comes to delaying the tab resize. Internet Explorer makes no attempt to decrease your mouse movements. Little things...

Is it just me? (software defaults)

I don't know how the wrong decisions about software defaults are made. Take the example on the left that happens to be from Excel 2007, but persists since the dawn of Excel. The bar chart is the default drawn when you choose the data shown.

To me it seems nonsensical that the categories top to bottom are in the opposite order to that of the data, and that the order of the series is reversed (the yes bar should be on top).

I can reverse the order by choosing reverse category order in the axis format menu, but that also switches the horizontal axis to be at the top - you need to format it again to move the axis back down. Perhaps they did a user-group study and I'm the odd one out - the expected behavior is that the order is reversed. If not though, was this a decision that was made (wrongly) by a single person or software team? Is it a bug that no-one ever noticed? Was it understood to be wrong in an earlier version but not corrected due to concerns about compatibility? Am I just too fussy to think that defaults should reflect what the majority would expect the default to be?

Spinning electrical sockets as an allegory for software design

While I'm not drawing thirty segment pie-charts in Excel (it's an insider joke), I try to make my house look a little less shabby. To draw inspiration I flick through copies of "This Old House". I came across the the item pictured in a "new stuff" section (a.k.a., filler pulled from press releases) from 2005 . You are meant to replace your receptacles with these new spinning versions:

When I was young, electrical outlets were sedentary, so if you needed to recharge your drill/driver and juice up your iPod at the same time, you had to pull out a power strip or find another wall with a free receptacle.. That's the story you'll be telling your grandchildren one day, after you've retrofitted all the outlets..

I'm sorry, what? This is a clear case of a use-scenario that plainly doesn't exist. 99.999% (I may be under exaggerating)  of people are not going to unwire their existing receptacles to replace them with these that cost at least five times as much. Not. going. to. happen. - they'll (I'll) just pull out an extension strip, and that will be that. If I have bulky transformers to plug in, chances are I'll need more than two outlets anyway. Now the company, which is still in existence surprisingly, does now tout a version that plugs into existing receptacles, giving you four spinny outlets. Nah, I'll still reach for my $3 version that even has two well spaced outlets for transformers.

Now the company may well be making money on the few outlets they sell, and that's great - they'll never dominate the world of receptacles, but if they're paying the mortgage, good luck to them. You can't however make the same assumption when you compare this to a new feature in your software suite. You may have the hots for this new feature, but if the use-scenario just doesn't exist then you're going to confuse your clients, annoy your sales force, and most importantly draw time away from providing what your clients actually need. In a later article I'll talk about use-scenarios, and how to create great ones (Hint: don't ask your customers what they want..)