Is There a "User" in

Your User Interface

Ladislav Mačkala

IT director, Podsjetnik d.o.o

About me

18+ years of experience in Java

development and relational database design

and implementation

Holding B.Sc. And M.Sc. in Computing

Have lead Java development teams in

several software companies in Croatia

Currently leading IT and Marketing

department in medical tourism company

What is this presentation about?

About my experience in GUI development

About importance of listening to your users

when developing GUI

About user-developer impedance mismatch

Motive

A real-life example

Application 1: CRM

developed in-house, custom-tailored, 1 year in production, cca 50 users

Application 2: ERP

made by a domestic software company, off-the-shelf product, 3 months in production, cca 10 users

Some users use both applications – their user experience with each of them is drastically different!

Motive (part II)

A friend of mine, a developer, showed me

his DSL framework and generated server-

side code.

When I asked about the GUI, he answered:

„Oh, that's easy.”

Is it?

User – developer impedance

mismatch End users and developers have different

perception of the same application

End users use it every day, in the predictive

way, and want the application to MAKE

THEIR LIFE EASIER!

Developers want to make cool things, but in

the end don't use these applications!

Goals

To find what makes end users ("them")

happy

To find what makes developers ("us") happy

To find ways to reduce user-developer

impedance mismatch

The developers' side

Developers love to create new, cool and

interesting stuff

Developers hate to do boring and repetitive

things (like maintaining their own code)

Developers are focused on technology

Developers are in love with their models

The developers' side (part II)

Developers think that the GUI they produce

is much less important then their code and

data models

Developers think they are smarter than their

users (danger!)

Developers rarely want or can see their

application through users' eyes – they rarely

think of USER EXPERIENCE

The users' side

Users use the application to do their job, and that which makes it easier

Users want to be faster using your application, not slower

Users don't want to adjust to the application, but want the application to be adjusted to them

Users want the application to look good, because they look at it most of the time

The users' side (part II)

Users want consistency while they work with the application – which means: they want to learn only once

Users want the application to be fast - which means: they don’t want to wait for the application

Users like colors, images, fonts, charts...

Users are INERT, they don't like changes

Real-life stories

Experiences of my team and my users

Both good and not so good

Story 1: make your GUI logical

Users want to be forced to use as little

clicks/steps as possible

Users want to learn things once and then to

repeat them

Consequence: my old users teach new

users how to use the application during

business rules education – without IT

support!

Story 2: accelerate time-consuming

tasks Creating offers for our patients

Frequent operation

Time-consuming: lots of manual tasks,

lots of clicks

Similar offers must be created from

scratch

Story 2: accelerate time-consuming

tasks (part II) Solution: implemented creating offers through

"shortcuts", "shortcut" templates and copying

offers

Result: time per offer reduced 5-10 times (15

min. to 2-3 min. per offer), for group of offers

even more

Users actively participated in development

and were delighted with that feature

Story 3: missing colors in the

pallette We upgraded our infrastructure (SmartGWT

3.0 -> 4.1)

The ColorPicker in the RichText editor

doesn't have the same colors in the pallete

And our users love the specific hue of pink

that is now gone!

Solution: not resolved yet – the possibility of

riots not negligible!

Before (v. 3.0)

After (v. 4.1)

Story 4: making application faster

We accelerated some frequently used parts of the application by adding missing indices in the database

We accelerated the frequently used reservation calendar with heavy refactoring and framework upgrade

We removed some premature optimizations that reflected general application performance

Consequence: nobody noticed!

When we asked them if they noticed, they admitted that it seemed a little bit faster, but they “weren’t sure"

Story 5: making application slower

We mistakenly deployed a new version with suboptimal SQL query in the frequently used part of the application

We upgraded our infrastructure due to serious bug that could cause data corruption and some parts of application got a little bit slower.

Consequence: our support lines got hot-red!

They notice the slightest change in speed, if that change in speed means slower!

Story 6: who wanted it? One user wanted something trivial like italic font and red color to emphasize something – it was done in minutes and everyone was delighted!

We made small auxiliary tool for our cashiers when they have to calculate percentages - it was done in an hour and they loved it!

We have worked for days on a complex feature that wasn't requested by users but was crucial to implement from business perspective – some users noticed and nobody was impressed!

Conclusion: it's not about how hard it is to implement something or how much time it took – it's about who wanted it in the first place and if it makes their life easier!

Story 7: protecting user from

themselves Users want to be informed when they are trying to

do something wrong

Users want to be warned if their actions may result

with some unpredicted situation

Users don't want to be able to do things in several

various ways, they want just one way

Conclusion: it's better to unnecessary warn your

users, than not to warn them at all!

Story 8: using colors and images

We made main application screens full of colors,

images and various fonts.

Our users are accustomed to the layout of those

views and can spot the vital information without

much reading, just scanning.

Conclusion: make your application easy to scan!

Conclusion

Include your users in all phases of your

development process!

Listen to them!

Don't assume what they want – ask them!

Make them happy and they will be grateful

and loyal! (maybe even do your job )

Q & A