Saturday, December 01, 2007
Appreciating users
We got a mention over at the Poetry Foundation. What's interesting to me is the comment, "I kept crashing Erica when I gave her my own topics."
The reason is that the user didn't click the "Add stanza" button before clicking the "Compose poem" button. One reaction (a very common one) on the part of the developer is that the cause should be obvious (and if it isn't, RTFM!).
But that's extremely shortsighted (and more than a little narcissistic). I've gotten a few messages from users who have run into the same problem. When multiple users encounter this kind of issue, it's not their fault--it is (and only is) the fault of the developer. Having to prep a system is a reflection of a developer's world view (that the user is in control), which is usually quite far removed from the way "normal" folk actually think and respond to software.
My mistake (purely a function of laziness) was in not guiding the user to an answer to this problem, a mistake I have corrected in a newly deployed directed-poetics page. Very simple to do--just pop up an alert if the user clicks "Compose poem" without first creating stanzas and return to the form.
This kind of thing happens all the time in commercial applications, but as often as not, developers just use such occurrences as reinforcement for the disdain in which they hold users, the very folks who are paying them.
And we wonder why people don't like working with software programmers!
# posted by Jim @ 11:24 AM 
