> We do not USE the thing we're building by and large.
Yes, thankyou, that's quite obvious judging by the quality of most software.
It really is amazing how bad most software made for non-developers is. Like, as software engineers, we understand how essential version control is. We made git and github for ourselves. But nobody has bothered building that functionality for people who edit word documents all day. Or people who edit video, or animators, or 3d modellers, or 100 different jobs. Word and google docs have track changes. But they don't let you bounce between branches or make pull requests. You usually can't time travel, or bisect, or git blame, or any of the other things we take for granted. My partner works in a CMS all day at work. Every change she makes is pushed directly to production. There's no review process. No staging. No testing. No change control or rollback. If anyone messes something up, they get blamed for "taking down the app". As a software engineer, I look on in horror.
I believe the more cognitive distance there is between 20-something silicon valley tech bros and your particular use case, the worse your software is going to be. If you're a manchild living in san francisco who can't be bothered driving, doing your laundry or shopping for groceries, you're in good hands. There is a startup that will solve your problem! But the further from that "ideal" you get, the worse. Here in Melbourne, I can't use my iphone to pay for public transit. Google maps couldn't really handle roundabouts (traffic circles) for a decade and change. (I guess they don't have those in California). Unicode support was only added recently because of Emoji. Until then, a huge amount of software butchered non-english text. I shudder to think how badly most software probably handles right to left languages. And the list goes on and on.
> My partner works in a CMS all day at work. Every change she makes is pushed directly to production. There's no review process. No staging. No testing. No change control or rollback. If anyone messes something up, they get blamed for "taking down the app". As a software engineer, I look on in horror.
Fwiw that just sounds like an immature CMS - I've seen review/approval workflows, branches, preview environments etc in more than one CMS. I take your overall point but maybe your partner doesn't have to live this way.
> I take your overall point but maybe your partner doesn't have to live this way.
I agree - but if a review system exists in the product, she's never seen it. They don't even have a staging system for testing changes. Its wild.
And for context, she works at a large organisation that's a household name here in Australia. This is a large organisation thats been around for well over 50 years. They have an engineering team and thousands of employees.
I don't know if the software is bad or if its misconfigured. But the status quo outside of our industry is jaw-droppingly terrible.
Yeah absolutely. I worked at a startup awhile ago with a really incredible designer. She insisted that everyone in the company sit in on one or two user interview sessions she had organised with our potential users. It was an incredibly eye-opening experience, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
I highly recommended doing the same if you can swing it. Its equal parts insightful and motivating. And the clients generally love it - since it shows your team really cares about their problems and use case.
Well my comment wasn’t really on usability or UX per se, just noting that the narrative of needing race car drivers is inaccurate. You don’t need to reverse B-trees to program normal software.
Also usability concerns have nothing to do with reversing B-trees.
