I used to control my finances on a spreadsheet and it was a real pain, I've never had a real estimate of anything, I just got very wrong assumptions.
This experience of using our own software was very constructive, in the first 5 minutes I thought: "how the hell can people use this?", But after a while I noticed that the software is very consistent and it does very well what it is supposed to do.
In 15 minutes I had about 15 ideas of improvements, some I tried to code right away, others, after some thinking proved not to be worth doing, and others gave ideas for future improvements.
Being a user of your own software just brings you benefits, you will know it better than anyone else and be user and developer at same time.
This quote fits perfectly for those developers that treats users as enemies:
"Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.” Sun Tzu
If you write software but don't use it, shame on you!
This post was inspired by: UsWare vs. ThemWare
Um comentário:
I completely agree. The best softwares in terms of usability are those built for developers, because they use it themselves and because the users know exactly how to give feedback.
First, there is the "us-ware" factor, as you mention: only when we actually use the thing, we know what and how to make it better. Then there is the communication factor, I think: since the users are programmers themselves they know comunicate better with the programmers who built the product.
After all, the bottom line is this: we do a lousy job communicating with our users base. We all do a bad job communicating with our users. They shouldn't have know how to talk with the developers. Instead, the developers should know better listen and understand what users say.
Maybe we should leave the keyboards a while, go back to school and start having a few Psycology lessons. ;-)
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