The White Lily (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thewhitelily) wrote2008-04-23 11:14 pm
thewhitelily) wrote2008-04-23 11:14 pm
User Experience
It's amazing how much a programmer can learn from an in-person training session with a real, honest-to-goodness user.
As long as the user is holding the mouse, every struggling attempt to determine which way to go next is another revelation in exactly where the path forward should lie. Every time you find yourself saying the words "Oh, you just need to..." is another time when you can make the discovery process one step easier for the next user. Every time they ask for something the system doesn't already cover, you've got a whole slew of new ideas begging to be acknowledged.
As always, for half a morning's observation, I've come away with about three-quarters of an A4 page covered in densely packed ideas, usability enhancements, and grand designs. Now I just have to get some time to implement a fraction of them in between finishing off my current infuriatingly almost-finished project and heading back to apply polish to the last couple of projects I was forced to finish and move on from without squeezing the juice out of the low-hanging fruit.
Today we got an unsolicited email from one of our users praising an enhancement I released a few weeks ago, which was very gratifying indeed. Yesterday we got a call from another client one saying "hey, that's really cool, and can you make it also..." And I'm pretty sure I can do it in fairly short order, when I come around to it again, and it'll simply be sweet. Tomorrow, Hubby and the boss are going down to Canberra to demonstrate the swanky-looking proof of concept I was working on before that to a potential business partner.
And while they're gone, I'm going to finish off the releasable version one of this current project, and start off another round of knocking people's socks off.
Yeah. Sometimes I really love what I do.
As long as the user is holding the mouse, every struggling attempt to determine which way to go next is another revelation in exactly where the path forward should lie. Every time you find yourself saying the words "Oh, you just need to..." is another time when you can make the discovery process one step easier for the next user. Every time they ask for something the system doesn't already cover, you've got a whole slew of new ideas begging to be acknowledged.
As always, for half a morning's observation, I've come away with about three-quarters of an A4 page covered in densely packed ideas, usability enhancements, and grand designs. Now I just have to get some time to implement a fraction of them in between finishing off my current infuriatingly almost-finished project and heading back to apply polish to the last couple of projects I was forced to finish and move on from without squeezing the juice out of the low-hanging fruit.
Today we got an unsolicited email from one of our users praising an enhancement I released a few weeks ago, which was very gratifying indeed. Yesterday we got a call from another client one saying "hey, that's really cool, and can you make it also..." And I'm pretty sure I can do it in fairly short order, when I come around to it again, and it'll simply be sweet. Tomorrow, Hubby and the boss are going down to Canberra to demonstrate the swanky-looking proof of concept I was working on before that to a potential business partner.
And while they're gone, I'm going to finish off the releasable version one of this current project, and start off another round of knocking people's socks off.
Yeah. Sometimes I really love what I do.