“When software is hard to use, don’t make excuses for it. Improve it. When a user makes a mistake, don’t blame the user. Ask how the software misled them. Then fix it. The user’s time is more valuable than ours. Respect it. Good UI design is humble.” - Jono DiCarlo
Read Jono from Mozilla Labs’ article “These things I believe” for his thoughts on software development and user interface design.
Nov 24th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Wow! I read quite a few of these and this one jumped out at me. I can’t tell you the number of times “bad design” came back as “user error” (or worse). I understand a designer’s frustration, as generally these incidents are small, and the majority of the work is clean and useful. So these problems appear as annoyances to designers. Your approach, or mind set, is one that all developers need to have. They have to jump on these issues instead of talking. “Can I leave this meeting to go work on that now” is better than any excuse.