Seven deadly excuses for poor design

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Forget excuses. Hire great developers.

I built an application for the "67th largest U.S. industrial/service corporation". I worked with the users to have every function they wanted and a few extras. I beat their fixed and optimistic deadline. (They were turning off the mainframe, and needed a replacement.)

They called me two years later. They were auditing all applications for policy compliance. One of the new policies is that all applications must have "Help" or "Instructions". Then I made a mistake. I asked about the turnover rate among the hundreds of users, and the number of helpdesk calls during the 2 years. The answer was that less than 10 of the original users were employed in the same job, many positions had turned over several times, and every call to the helpdesk was asking for access to the application.

Two years. Thousands of new users. No instructions. No requests for help.

I asked if they still wanted me to write instructions. The job disappeared.

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I am building a tracking and action application as a product. We have worked with our early customers for a year. We rearrange the UI so that it is incredibly easy to quickly add data. There is a place for users to discover exactly what needs their attention. We are working on making the application configure itself as it learns your business. The product is still in heavy development, but the current version is very useful. We expect to announce a major contract very soon. And we never expect any of the (usually uneducated/computer-illiterate/minimum-wage) users to require assistance to use the application.

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Relating our product to the article:
1. We will be "first to market" with an application that auto-adjusts as it learns your business and suggest improvements to your business. Word-of-mouth is building our customer-base. We have never looked for business from somebody who did not contact us.
2. We started with little budget, but our developers are so good they do everything well. The product has customers, but development of new functionality continues.
3. The requirements are adjusted as we watch how the users use the application.
4. Everything must "make sense" to us, but we still watch the users to see if they frown or slow down.
5. Something is only cool if it makes it easier for the users. Most of the screens are plain, but everything is easy to understand and use.
6. The users are already "used to it", but we notice when it takes three clicks when it could take one. Most of the new functionality is to reduce the work of the basic tasks. (Why do people use wizards with one question per screen? It is easier to answer everything on one screen since you can see your old answers and not click OK again and again.)
7. Helpdesks are good for discovering what needs to be improved, but if an application generates calls, that application needs more UI work or redesigning. Every call for our application has been:
A. Their infrastructure was configured wrong. We try to assist, but it is not our responsibility.
B. The adminstrator needs help configuring the application. We answer any questions, and redesign to make it easier.
C. The configuration of the application becomes obsolete. We are redesigning to make it auto-adjust.

Notice that the hundreds of users never call our helpdesk (even though the phone number is the first thing they see), and we are trying to eliminate reasons administrators call. (We may never eliminate "A". We just solved an issue because MSActiveDirectory was misconfigured without changing MSActiveDirectory or our application.)

Posted by: solprovider   Posted on: 09/02/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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