133
submitted 1 year ago by mastermind@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] IonAddis@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yup. It's definitely always about people. The people using it.

I've worked in software support, QA, and technical writing.

A LOT of developers who come in as devs from the very start of their careers know very little about how the average person might interact with the software they are creating. And what they know of, they can (sometimes) be so sneering and dismissive of that it actually impacts their design decisions. Like, "I don't care, the user is stupid, I'm doing it the RIGHT way." Even when the "stupid user" is like 90% of the population that'll use your widget.

A new (and old) dev should read past customer tickets and talk to your customer support people, as they'll have the actual real-world experience and examples with non-technical users that can give you insight into how to better create the thing that you are creating.

To make a comparison...say you were a furniture designer making chairs, and you're 6'3". Sitting in the chair yourself and proclaiming it's fine isn't enough if your users are children, women, guys shorter than you, people lighter than you, people heavier than you, and the disabled. You need to actually understand how people who navigate the world in a different way than you do interact with the thing you're making. A chair that works fine for someone who is 6'3" with two working legs might be unusable for a 11 year old who broke their foot, or a 4'11" grandmother who can no longer move heavy things around (say if the chair is solid and heavy and something a 6'3" dude could easily move).

With technology, it means average non-tech users will flow through menus differently than you, might have vision or hearing problems that you don't have that make signals from the widget difficult to decipher, and people in general who are non-techie can also be more risk-adverse when it comes to things like clicking strange buttons. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
133 points (97.2% liked)

Asklemmy

43942 readers
644 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS