January 17, 2003

Sweet Spot

There is a huge difference between software that works and good software. Good software provides you with the right set of options for what you do normally while providing you with a way to customize that application when you do weird things. Sometimes this means just a series of configuration settings; sometimes it means you have the source. This is the sweet spot where you stop fighting the software and use it to get something else done.

I just started using Movable Type as my weblogging software after using Blogger and messing around with GreyMatter, Radio Userland, and home-grown solutions. With each of these systems I found some major flaw that I simply couldn't deal with: doesn't produce good markup, too much upkeep, runs locally, costs too much, etc. When I finally found a solution that I was happy with I simply stopped thinking as much when I publish things.

Movable Types asks me simple questions:

If I ever decide that I would like to change the way I do things I can - but after my first few uses I am still simply using the default settings for everything, allowing me to forget about things that I used to worry about like valid markup, syndication in RSS, working archives, etc.

This software sweet spot seems to be getter rarer to me. As part of a series of New Year's resolutions I have decided to start being very methodical about keeping a family budget. Since I have never done this before I fired up Microsoft Excel and starting typing in numbers to see what I spend money on (number one conclusion: food and books, and I should start walking to work). Since Microsoft Excel isn't really made for this sort of thing I quickly tired of it and found myself wanting to do a few basic things like setup a template budget and create pie charts of actual spending, etc.

So I fired up Quicken New User Edition (why was Basic Edition not a good name?) that we bought apparently with our new system a few weeks ago. Quicken is very popular, but I know absolutely nothing about it except that you use it to manage money. So I fired it up and starting looking around for budget stuff. After some proding it revealed itself and I started plugging in numbers. It created pie charts, calculated weekly, monthly, yearly figures (I spend $900 a year on Internet access?!) After entering the basics like power and car insurance I spent a good ten minutes trying in vain to find out how to add a new category for Reading materials (my computer books and my wife's magazines). Looking at my Excel spreadsheet I had a few categories that weren't in Quicken and I had only been doing this for thirty minutes total. So after more gentle nudging I found that you could setup new categories but you have to setup your accounts (as in actual checking and savings) through Quicken and then create new categories. Quicken would then create the budget automatically for you. Not wanting to sign my life away I am still searching for a program that will hit the very large middle ground where I can do only a simple family budget.

Finding this sweet spot where the average user can do simple, common tasks easily while at the same time keeping them as users when they start doing uncommon, advanced tasks is very hard to do. Blogger is a wonderful weblogging tool, but as my needs became more sophisticated it couldn't scale with me. Most software companies have trouble with large products like Quicken or Microsoft Office because they are used by so many people. Although I am hard on Microsoft, I do understand that user-focus is very hard to do when your customer base is best described as the worldwide computer user market. How do you know how many users only want to do a budget? Ask them.

At work our specialty is user-focus because we are so small. It is much easier to find out what your users are doing when we are already tailoring each system for them to begin with. We deal with airlines, military, public transportation systems, etc. and we are constantly trying to figure out what each operator does often each day (For example, a 911 dispatcher needs an Emergency mode and Emergency clear button to set priorities on calls). Even in such a small company it is hard to define user needs because they change with time. After we deploy a system to a customer the operators change their behavior to the new systems and start using them differently. They complain and we fix. All in the name of the sweet spot.

January 17, 2003 11:37 AM