August 19, 2008: About the users
If you’re anywhere in IT, I think you’ll profit by reading Joel Spolsky’s 9-chapter User Interface Design for Programmers. It’s available free on the web - in fact that link opens the whole thing as one big web page. If you’re not a slow reader, you should be able to get through the whole thing in under two hours.
You’ll learn some surprising things about how users think. Some are funny at first; but like many of the funniest things, they are also inescapably true. And sometimes, the joke’s on you, Mr. IT Guru!
But why would you want to spend two hours on this if you’re not a programmer doing something related to user interface design, you ask? The answer is, no matter where you are in IT, you serve the users, and you should learn how they think. We’ve all heard the dumb user jokes; we’ve all seen our colleagues grimace at the mere mention of that one especially thick user in Accounting. Most of us have given or at least heard the rant about the idiot users, and how the systems would be so much easier to manage if we could somehow remove the users.
I’ve done it too. But I stand here with a smile on my face and I really mean it when I say: we’re wrong when we think this way. Just flat-out wrong. We need to make serious efforts to change our thinking about this. The occasional comic rant may be ok, but by and large, we need to get it through our IT-biased heads that users have better things to do than become computer experts like us.
Okay, so that’s a bit of a hard line. Joel’s mini-book isn’t as in-your-face about this as I am; it is an easy, funny, and quick read, and it is well worth your time, since you serve the users. Even if you never see or talk to them, you serve them - and learning a bit about what this stuff looks like from their POV will make you better at your job.
Can’t be bothered to read the whole thing? Then I recommend the mere 10 minutes you’ll spend on Chapter 6: Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives.
