Human Interfaces to Software

I came across an interesting post on Tyner Blain blog called “Customer Service and Software Development“. The post starts with a thought provocating statement “Sometimes we forget that people use our software”.

To build more human interfaces in terms of error messages when the team is struggling to meet deadlines can be a real challenge. “Lets get the functionality working” is usually the first goal. “Is the application I am developing friendly enough?” is a question we can tackle later on after functionalities are achieved. The post rightly emphasizes the fact that poor user interfaces means poor customer service further on instilling a sense of customer services throughout the development process and expect team to get it right the first time. I agree.

The author succinctly puts across the point –

It takes the same amount of time to program “Oops, I lost your network connection, but I have a saved backup right here, do you want to restore it?” as it does to program “Network Error! TCPIP fault, unexpected connection closed.”