Life is too short for bad software
/Great title, isn’t it? Not original, of course (what is, these days of Google?), taken from a talk given by Lew Cirne, founder and CEO of New Relic about his journey about software entrepreneurship. But it’s just too good a line to be stuck to just that, so I’m repurposing for my topic today about bad UX design in software and how that destroys people’s lives.
“One guy’s bad software is another guy’s full time job”
We had a poster up on our social media page today that seems to have hit a nerve of a lot of people. I’ve copied it here, for those of my readers who don’t speak Bangla the text just says something like: “One guy’s bad software is another guy’s full time job”. The expression on the guy’s face says it all.
It’s an easy picture to relate with. With most of our work these days tied with working with one software or another - a bad software - which usually just means a bad user interaction design - really is a hated thing. Us, developers of software, are definitely the ones to take the blame for the bad software but a fun fact is that we too face the same problems. We use clunky IDEs (integrated development environments) to code, we use numerous “wannabe” issue trackers and “agile” project management tools to manage our work. Some of us even have to rely on time tracking tools that are always misbehaving for some reason.
Bad UX is a real problem and life is really just too short for it.
The cumulative cost per year of lost efficiency because of bad software design must be some humongous number enough to buy a thousand Jeff Bezos (erm.. maybe a hundred of him).
However, bad software can kill, too.
We learnt this the hard way in the recent software glitch that led to the 737 Max crashes or when when an Ebola patient was sent home because of bad UX design
The sad truth is that good UX isn’t rocket science. Anyone can get to a state of learning the basics - common sense level basic UX in a matter of days if not hours. A simple google search will lead you to a hundred good pages that tell you most of the tricks. There are books after books piling up on good design. Here’s one that caught my eye recently for making the point very drastically and then showing the way out.
And no discussion on UX design goes online from me without a mention to the guru whose book About Face taught me that there is a thing like interaction design!
So let us, software people say once and for all that bad design is our public enemy no. 1. And we will get rid of it wherever we find it!
