Re: Question about Programmers and Usability

["Larry Kunz ((919) 254-6395)" <ldkunz -at- VNET -dot- IBM -dot- COM>]

Suzanne Townsend asked, whence the notion that programmers don't
care about usability?  Here are some thoughts....

- No programmer sets out to produce software that's hard to use.
  Every programmer I know wants to produce something they can be
  proud of.  Convince a programmer that Option A will make the
  product easier to use than Option B and, all things being equal,
  the programmer will choose Option A.

- As Sella Rush points out, programmers sometimes have to shift
  their focus from the big picture to the "code zone."  (That
  makes a lot of sense, Sella; and, believe me, it's not often
  that I agree with someone named Rush.)  On the big IBM software
  projects I documented, each programmer usually worked on only
  a few modules.  It was understandably hard for them to see the
  forest when focusing on a couple of trees.

- Here's one we can identify with.  Sometimes programmers feel so
  much pressure to code "to spec," to make deadlines, and to deal
  with a hundred other day-to-day pressures, that usability slides
  down the priority list a little bit.

- The very things that make them good programmers -- sharp,
  analytical minds, attention to detail, keen intuition -- keep
  programmers from fitting the "typical user" mold.  Many of them
  will cheerfully admit this and ask for your help to gain an
  end-user's perspective.

To sum up:  Programmers do value usability.  The existence of
unusable software doesn't imply that programmers don't care.....
Any more than the existence of bad documentation implies that
technical writers don't care about communication.

Larry Kunz
STC Assistant to the President for Professional Development
mailto:ldkunz -at- vnet -dot- ibm -dot- com