10 Nov, 2009
Learning to Live with kinks in an Application?
Posted by: Michael Mainiero In: Web Development| Web best practices
OK, so this is not a novel idea — but it struck a chord with me nonetheless.
I was driving up to my parents and decided to try out the voice command system on the iphone. Pretty darn slick, it recognized my multiple vowel last name when calling my mother. The weird thing though, it required me to manually select speakerphone after using a handsfree voice command. Why wouldn’t this default to hands free?
is this by design? A bug? An overlooked feature?
The funny thing is, I didn’t really care. It didn’t bother me that the phone didn’t have this feature. Then i began to wonder “why don’t i care”.
I began to list the potential reasons:
1. I am brainwashed into thinking apple can do no wrong
2. I am willing to over look minor inconveniences
Nope, none of these.
3. I am confident that apple will fix this – they are constantly improving their software
Yep, I think its this one.
Can confidence in a software development team mitigate the frustration of an end user? the thought that there are iterations, or incremental improvements based on user feed back is something I think we underestimate as developers. As I think about how i interact with people I am developing websites and applications for, I think about how I can mitigate frustration. I think the ability to deliver improvements and instill this confidence in the people who use software may go a long way.
