Better Software - June 2008 - (Page 47)

The Last Word How to Fail Less and Enjoy More by Frédéric Boulanger If there were a coffee shop where 75 percent of the coffee tasted awful, how many times would you spend your money there? As consumers, we wouldn’t put up with that at our local café, so why are we surprised when so many software products are commercial failures? There are a lot of badly designed software products in the world. Sure, some products are slow, with clunky back ends that waste the users’ time. But more importantly, with some products, it’s hard for the user to accomplish his everyday tasks. And guess what? Users don’t like poorly designed software products. Users will only run these applications at gunpoint or if management forces them—which is pretty much at gunpoint. High-tech workers tend to love technology for its own sake. But we have to remember that our users don’t. In fact, the whole idea of calling the people for whom we develop products “users” is wrong thinking. Calling them “users” of our products is product-centric; it makes the product more important than the person who needs it. No one calls a ditch-digger a “shovel user.” He’s a guy with a task to accomplish. The shovel is the tool he uses to accomplish it. That’s how we have to think about what we do. A software application isn’t an end in itself. Our task is not producing software; it’s helping our customers finish their work faster. Our job isn’t writing code; it’s giving our customers fast tools to get their jobs done. Even if you make the quickest, shiniest software application in the world and ship it on time and under budget, it’s a failure if it doesn’t make someone’s job easier. Failures cost us customers, which costs us money. If you had to go to the terrible coffee shop and buy four cups to get one good one, you’d figure out pretty quickly that the one good cup had the price of three failures embedded in it. Right now, our successful applications have the price of our failures embedded in them. We’ve cut costs by outsourcing manufacturing and development. The next wave of software cost cutting will be reducing our cost of failure. No one calls a ditch-digger a “shovel user.” He’s a guy with a task market was nightclub DJs, your product would fail. If you designed an MP3 player based on a sound mixing board and the target market was senior citizens, that’s another failure. If you read a manual for a word processing applicaThe flip side of products to accomplish. tion (a good one, anyway), that fail are the products people love to use—and I use the word you won’t find a procedure for “Using love deliberately. We need to create ap- the underlining feature”—that’s featureplications that people like as much as centric. But you will find a section on “How to underline words”—that’s taskthey like a good cup of coffee. It’s easy to imagine loving a cool centric. This is because manuals are deproduct like an iPod or your car’s GPS signed to help people accomplish what navigation system, but how does that they need to do, not play around with translate to the Web interface of your technology. The people who use our company’s time-tracking software? Could software don’t think about “features,” they think about their tasks. anyone ever love that? The key in that situation would be to design the product to be simple, Design for Simplicity—Not user-friendly, and to save time. When it Coolness comes to software we have to use, the We all got into the software busidifference between loathing it and loving ness because we love technology. But it is how much time we save when using the people who buy our software don’t it. That’s part of the reason why we skip necessarily love technology. They aren’t Flash intros on Web sites, no matter buying technology; they are buying how cool. They get in the way of accom- the tools they need to make their lives plishing the task we need to do on the easier. site. People would hate the iPod’s scroll We have to remember this when we wheel if it didn’t do exactly what you design. So when we consider adding a imagine it should (if turning it clockwise cool feature that showcases some new scrolled left or rewound the song). technology, we have to ask ourselves if it makes our customers’ daily life easier or are we adding it because we can? Get to Know the People Developing Products People Love Design for Tasks— Not Features Who Want Our Software Creating applications that people love doesn’t start with awesome database architecture or an EJB back end. It starts with knowing who your customers are and what tasks they want to accomplish. If you designed a simple MP3 player that could only play, stop, and scroll through songs, where the titles were shown in a very large font, but the target www.StickyMinds.com One Cup of Coffee Fewer software failures mean more software successes—we will build products people will love and want to use. We’ll save all the time and money we spent brewing bad coffee. In the end, that will make our one cup of coffee taste so much sweeter. {end} JUNE 2008 BETTER SOFTWARE 47 http://www.StickyMinds.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Better Software - June 2008

Better Software - June 2008 Contents Mark Your Calendar Contributors Technically Speaking eLightenment Code Craft Test Connection Management Chronicles Agile Model-Driven Development The Myth of Risk Management Stop the Insanity! Product Announcements 10 Things You Might Not Know About … The Last Word Ad Index

Better Software - June 2008

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