DevBlog

Doug's recent post, The User is Always Right, got me thinking about software complexity and what Microsoft calls the User Experience (Ux). For some time, I've had the habit of printing out interesting articles and hanging them outside my cube. When I find something new, I rotate the old one out and the new one in. For the past few weeks, I've had three things that tie directly back to Doug's blog entry.

The first is an article from Computer World titled, "Scientist: Complexity causes 50% of product returns". How many of us develop software that is just too hard to use? While I don't have specific statistics on this, I'll bet it's higher than most of us think it is.

The second article, "Why Features Don't Matter Any More" is from eWeek. It lists 10 rules for technology based on user experience:
1) More features isn't better, it's worse.
2) You can't make things easier by adding to them.
3) Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker.
4) Style matters.
5) Only features that provide a good user experience will be used.
6) Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small fraction of users.
7) Unused features are not only useless, thay can slow you down and diminish ease of use.
8) Users do not want to think about technology: What really counts is what it does for them.
9) Forget about the killer feature.
10) Less is difficult; that's why less is more.

So, how does this apply to what we're doing in our software? I think of Office 2007. If you haven't seen it yet, you're in for a shock. The UI has been completely overhauled. In fact, menus have been completely removed. Why did Microsoft take this drastic step? Simple. Office is too complex and has too many features. The Office team claims that 80% of enhancement requests were for things that are already in the product. So, they took a drastic step and did a major UI overhaul to make things more discoverable. Are we willing to take those same steps to make our software easier to use and improve the Ux?

The final article is a blog entry, "User Experience Matters", from Soma Somasegar, Microsoft Corporate VP, Developer Tools. Soma talks about how software used to be developed based on functionality and business logic, but now things are turning more toward the Ux.

The application can meet all the functionality needs and have all the business logic to get the job done, but if the user hates using it or it is difficult to use, there are areas for improvement. So, Doug was right. It's all based on the customer and their experience with the software.