In the past couple months, I’ve had two experiences with two different business that screwed up. In both cases, these are business to which I have given a substantial amount of money. What was notable, though, is how professionally both of them screwed up. Which is not to say that they screwed up in a more advanced manner than the amateur could, but rather that in both instances the business responded professionally. So professionally, in fact, that not only would I willingly give them more of my business, I’d happily recommend those businesses to others. Even though neither of these businesses is remotely involved in technology, the pattern demonstrated by them is something that any business or consultant should take to heart.
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The start of my current so-called sabbatical has ended up focusing on user interface. While at the 2008 Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco I attended a couple of sessions on the topic, or on related ones. I’ll post some thoughts and notes from those sessions soon. I also took with me to San Francisco the book Defensive Design for the Web: How to improve error messages, help, forms, and other crisis points
Anyway, as a person that develops Web sites for a living (or part of my living, at least), I’m sometimes terribly annoyed when I find a site that doesn’t work or make sense. As a person that likes to think he knows what he’s doing when it comes to Web sites, if I can’t figure out something, I can’t imagine that the less knowledgeable person could. I think getting UI right is hard for people as it can be difficult imagining how others might use the software or site you’ve developed. I’ll provide more specific recommendations on this subject soon, but I wanted to mention this as a recent area of interest now just so you know what to expect in the next couple of weeks in this blog.
One particular idea I’ll throw out here was presented at one of the Adobe MAX sessions I attended. That speaker talked about how you should be “an ambassador for the end user”, which is a nice phrase and a good reminder. He also pointed out that while you’re developing software or a Web site for a client, they often won’t be the ones interfacing with your creation. So as a Web developer, you need to hit the mark between giving the client what they think they want and giving the end user what they really need.
