The Effective CIO

I Feel Your Pain November 4, 2009

Users are in a tough position.  They’ve evolved to the point where they cannot do their jobs without computers.  The systems that they use are becoming more and more sophisticated, with equally sophisticated interfaces.  Worst of all, they have little or no control over how those systems are built.

Our users rely on us to build systems that are easy to use, reliable, and consistent.  They have no idea how we do this, not do they care.  They trust us to take care of the awful details of system design and development to make things that they find useful.  Regrettably, I don’t think we on the IT side of the house do as good a job as we could on their behalf.

We often make design decisions that cause users great angst.  I’m not talking about sweeping design changes; I’m thinking more about the small, subtle things that can make a big difference in a user’s life.  The layout of a screen, the ordering of a menu, the arrangement of a list can dramatically affect the usability of a tool.  Poor usability results in unhappy users.

Many times, these kind of decisions get made on the basis of how complicated it can be to implement a better alternative.  In short, we reduce development time and expect the user to deal with a less-effective interface.  We reduce developer pain at the expense of user pain, and that’s wrong.

I’ve written about this before.  One of my biggest peeves in just about every web site on earth is that you cannot enter anything but digits into a credit card number field.  The developer will not set the field to “numeric only;” instead, they’ll put some awful text near it that explains that you should not type dashes or spaces in the field.  Here’s a big idea: how about you write some code to strip out dashes and spaces, so I can type the number in a way that make sense to me?  The developer saved twenty minutes; users spend collective years trying to type things correctly.

There are countless examples of this in every system we use.  Time and again, developers and designers make their lives easier by asking users to do a little bit more.  The problem is that the development time is incurred once; the user time incurred over and over and over again, for years.

We owe our users better. They trust us to build systems they can use.  We need to feel their pain, take it on ourselves, and remove it from their day-to-day lives.  Users are the most important part of any system; we need to show that we understand that by building things that respect their time and energy.  Show your users some love: build things that put them first.

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