Cogito Ergo Wiki

For your entertainment and delectation, I offer up a small write-up in which I muse about complexity and simplicity in the tools we choose to inflict upon our project partners.

A short excerpt:

I think that WikiMedia is a relatively terrible thing to inflict upon unsuspecting project partners who are already stressed out by the weird idea that they should contribute documentation to your project, that they might actually be asked to actually write something

Wiki Wondering: Share and enjoy.

User Interface Redesigns

I love this quote by E. A. Vander Veer in "Why Does Facebook Keep Redesigning?"

typically users aren't considered at all when it comes to software redesigns. I wouldn't have believed this if I hadn't seen it in action on countless projects in several different companies! The attitude is, "We're the experts, we know what you want and need, our redesign is making it better, and it won't take more than a few minutes for you to get up to speed."

This is more true than I care to think about! Case in point: the SA Weather Service's abomination of a website. They went from a site that, while it had its faults, was uncluttered, easy to navigate, and pretty useful to an astonishingly broad range of audiences whose weather-and-climate-information needs are wildly different: from farmers to firefighters, airline pilots to town-planners. The new site provoked such a backlash when it was first released that the Weather Service website developers were forced to put in links back to the old site in order to provide the vast swathes of information that was missing from the new one.¹

Rather than ragging any further on the shitty Weather Service website, allow me to point out one fundamental driver of user-interface redesigns that E A Vander Veer seems to have missed... a reason that goes, in fact, far further than UI redesigns, but is all too often a well concealed motivation for many, many software rewrites and redesigns: We redesign and rewrite because the developers want to play around with a bunch of flavour-of-the-day, oooh-shiny-new-toy technologies.

Not knocking E A's basic insight, though... The motivation seldom comes from the users (or their legitimate representatives) themselves, but almost always from the technical insiders who want change for change's sake.

Like those who thought that adding autoboxing and varargs to the Java language was a value-add...

---

[1] At the same time the SAWS web designers tried to do the whole "Social Weather 2.0" thing. Sadly they missed the point completely. Any negative comments on the forums regarding the new site were silently deleted. Way to build trust, guys!