Rob Herbst

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I have found almost every post to be thought provoking and very insightful.

Read this post Are your users stuck in “P” mode, then come back. I’ll wait right here.

Ok great, your back!

As a developer myself, I know that finding the right size of both the green and purple circles requires a lot of hard work. (You did read the article…right?)

There is a great deal of complexity and context that any developer has to keep in their head in order to write code effectively. It’s hard for a developer to step back sometimes and see the bigger picture. Yes, we as developers might think a feature is very cool, but is the user really going to care?

It is much easier for a developer to provide a bunch of options on what the user could do and let them figure it out, instead of focusing on the much harder problem of what the user is really interested in doing, and how can we streamline that as much as possible.

In order to get that kind of feedback, you really need to do usability testing. Watch users trying to use your application, and see what they are having trouble with. Refine and simplify your user interfaces until they feel natural, and don’t require you to review the online help.

I also think once users figure out a way to do things — even if it’s very time consuming, they sometimes don’t take a step back and explore the other features offered in a program that might make their task easier.

We as developers need to make this an easier and less scary thing for the users to do. And users, some of us developers have really been trying, have some of our approaches been that great, no not really, but the thought is there.

The one area currently that I see that seems to find a good balance is the use of screencasts. This gives the users a very low stress way of having new features demonstrated to them. It’s just watching a movie, there’s no way that could do anything bad to the users data. I think a well produced screencast demo, with an underlying voice track that guides the users through the process should be used for each critical feature in an application.

I have seen some progress being made in the new generation of web and desktop applications, but we as developers still need to do more.