If you haven’t had enough of a preview of FeedDemon’s upcoming tagging features, then check out this guest post I wrote for the NewsGator Widgets Blog.
“One of the more challenging tasks developers face — regardless of whether they develop desktop applications, web applications or even widgets — is designing a feature in a way that not only hides the technical details, but also respects the end user by not asking them to do too much work.”
I talk about how adding a feature requires thinking about the extra work you’d require of your customers if you don’t design it correctly, with FeedDemon’s tagging features used as examples.
A consequence of (Steve) Job’s Paradox, to the effect that it takes a lot of complexity (e.g., software) to make something simple (e.g., the Mac). Reducing keystrokes to accomplish a given task is always a good goal, while trying to figure out a ‘typical’ customer’s workflow may well be impossible. The simple things come first, like increasing the font size within the application, even though custoemrs can do that with the screen’s DisplayProperties, but don’t. So far as I know, all attempts of having a program ‘learn’ a customer’s workflow have been disappointing. Certainly challenging. Our experience has been that good, useful ideas bubble up when actually talking with a customer, but unfortunately that doesn’t happen as much as we’d like.