Tonight I was helping my son with his first term paper. He was using a program from school to layout his thoughts according to the format required by his teacher. I could have done the work in any different number of tools with ease. But he had to use the tool provided, and it was different than anything I had ever used. Moreover, it wasn’t intuitive. Even worse, after formatting the whole thing, as soon as we added the citations, it moved everything around, made text disappear, moved boxed and essentially made the whole thing useless.
What did I learn tonight, and how does it apply to us as software professionals?
When I need to get work done, I don’t like to add to the work the challenge of learning a whole new tool into the mix. I like to learn new tools a lot, and spend hours every week trying to keep fresh with new ideas. But, I don’t like to have to do it when there is a time constraint.
What is intuitive to one person may not be intuitive to others. We needed a citation (footnote) for the contents of the paper. I wanted to insert a superscript number. The feature was not available in the tool. Instead, I had to insert a footnote with the cursor placed where I wanted the superscript number to appear. This makes sense, and ties the superscript to the footnote at the bottom.
Do we sometimes over-automate software with the goal of making things simple. We try to take steps out of doing something. In the process, we make it work only one way. Then when someone needs to do something a little different, we disabled that process. Perhaps less simplifying, maybe integrating a wizard or something of the like, will teach people how to help themselves, instead of making them a slave to your simplification.
What do we really need? Is it Simplicity? Is it Flexibility? Is it power? I guess that there are times we need any of the above. That’s why most GUI software had multiple ways to do the same thing. Today things are being simplified such that you really don’t have the options of the past.
Am I just ranting, or is do you have similar feelings? Pick on me, or agree with me by leaving a comment.
Cheers,
Ben