January 11, 2007

Balancing Ease of Use in Designs

I've long held that in software design and development that the only wrong way of solving a problem is one that does not work. I do however believe that some ways of solving problems are better than others.

In various entries I've talked about the ways I approach trying to arrive at better solutions, some of them were quite abstract. Most of them are ways of evaluating whether one solution is better than another.

In conversation yesterday with Neil, one evaluation came up that I have found very useful: which solution makes the everyday usage easiest?

This evaluation is probably quite familar to consumers of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) but often does not seem to be familiar to producers of APIs.

When designing something always consider adding a bit of complexity to doing the unusual things in order to make it easier to do the usual things.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Oh boy do I have a comment! I have just spent an hour on the phone with a b.t. computer dude, who had to go all over the houses to get it running. Now my question to you is this:Computers and there programs are designed by men, woman don't think the same, hence unless we can think like men we haven't a hope in hell. Why can't there be two types of computers one that was designed and thinks like females and on that is designed for males? life would be much less stressful this way and I would be able to cope.