Over the course of the last week I attended a few demonstrations in order to get feedback from the client about what adjustments we should be making. As is normal with these kinds of gatherings a lot of new options were put on the table, but it struck me how some of these were more oriented to the domain expert rather than the casual user - who are in the vast majority.
This is a trap that you can fall into when adding features to a piece of software. You can train yourself to detect expert features - for example, if your sentence starts with “wouldn’t it be great if…” then you might be looking at a domain expert feature, so ask yourself the question - how many years has it taken you to realise that “it would be great if”?
Actually - this is one of the reasons that I like some of the scoping aspects of MSF Agile because it allows a team to get clear definitions of who their users are (personas) and a description of the functionality from their perspective (scenarios).
[...] It is offical I am in LOVE with Google Reader, just like GMail, Google Reader rocks. It is fast, easy to use and allows me to read my feeds how I want to. This is very important. Why cause I control how the application works not the other way around. I suspect that this is because Google developers are, as Mitch Denny blogger last week, in tune with their users, the question is are are their users advanced or mainstream and will that impact their long term success? Or is Google building their products so that the expert features are nicely hidden and then allow the average user just to get on with using the tool? User Interface is such an important part of any application. I also really, really like the GreaseMonkey script that allows me to have Google Reader and GMail in the same window. Second quick update, I am a bad blogger. I have just not been writing here which is really not like me. So what is up? [...]