Adding magic
November 18, 2009
Designing interactive software systems is a fantastic opportunity not only meet the objectives of your customer, but improve the day-to-day experience of the end users. This responsibility doesn’t come lightly; get it wrong and you run can just as easily frustrate and irritate those users, and even a mediocre system will become a hated system over time.
What we need to do is to try to think as a user does, see a system as a user sees it and consider the bigger picture of that user’s working day. How does this system fit in with the other things they do. Do they want to be able to use this system concurrently with another system? Will we need to work with a non-maximised screen layout in mind? How much assistance in using a system is enough? How much is too much?
The list of considerations is seemingly endless, but by thinking about these things we achieve something very important indeed: we start seeing a system from a user’s perspective. In other words, we start to really appreciate just how a system will fit in with the workflow of our users, in the context of their everyday tasks. In essence, we start considering that system’s place in the ecosystem of a user’s day.
We have, then, our opportunity to add value beyond the delivery of ‘a system’. We can deliver ‘a solution’ that integrates into workflow more effectively, and delivers real benefit through the combination of increased productivity, ease of use, interoperability with other systems and so on.
What we have is the opportunity to really improve, to ‘add magic’ to that user’s day. Let’s not waste that opportunity by rushing our software out the door…
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