| Joel on Software Joel Spolsky has just published two excellent pieces on his web site. They will be of interest to programmers and those who work in software companies. The first is a review of a new piece of software for usability studies called 'Morae'. As a programmer myself, I've long come to the conclusion that programmers (including me) simply don't think the way non-programmers do. Now, programmers can take one of two attitudes to this problem. The majority view is that the rest of the world should change. The result of this is that the majority of software sucks! It doesn't do what the users expect and leads to user mega-frustration and expensive customer support requirements. The alternative, which I feel is more useful (though I have to confess to being guilty of backsliding on occasion), is to find out how the non-programmers think and adapt the user interface to their customers' expectations. And that is where usability studies come in. The problem is, traditional usability studies involve the use of extremely expensive (think six figure sums to hire) labs. For those of you who haven't come across it, usability testing involves giving users the software to use with no extras other than what they would get from opening the shrink wrap on the box, and videoing the results. People I know who've tried this tell me the results are very, very, sobering! The product Joel is reviewing, Morae, allows you to do this without having a huge expensive lab. It's still not cheap at over a grand, but it's immeasurably cheaper than the alternatives. Also, and I think this will be the killer app for this software, it looks to me from the description that it will be easier to set this up in the field - on the user's own computer, in their own environment. That will help eliminate problems due to an unfamiliar computer/environment. I'll be interested to see just how well Morae does in the market. The second piece is about programmers. I make no apology for talking about programmers, I am, after all, a programmer as well as a games designer. It has long been my contention that good programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than ordinary programmers. I make this assertion based on over 20 years of programming. Unfortunately, how do you define 'good', 'ordinary' and 'productive'? I've never been able to find any metrics to back up. Enter Joel Spolsky, a programmer himself, who has finally come up with at least some metrics which might indicate that my assertion is on the correct lines. Joel also takes up the question of whether you can substitute (say) five ordinary programmers for one good programmer, and gives an excellent, clear, explanation of why you can't. As 'C' and 'C++' programmers would put it '(ord_prog *5) != good_prog'. (For a truly geeky expression, remove all vowels.) Highly recommended reading! http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/UsabilityTestingwithMorae.html
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