Home Improvement And Software Design
Maintaining a home is a continuing, and seemingly never ending, learning experience. Many of the lessons learned can be profitably exploited by applying them to software design.
Maintaining a home falls in two broad categories. The major one consists of those things that only a professional should do, such as plumbing and electrical. The minor one is those things that a homeowner can do directly, and tend to be fairly simple, such as spiffing up a garden patio.
Spiffing up ours required another new tool that probably will be used only once, a simple chalk line that turned out not so simple. For openers, like many (most?) software products, it required clairvoyance when the presumed prior knowledge is lacking. The home improvement center had a shelf of chalk lines from about five manufacturers, all looking and packaged so similarly that the thought of all of them being made by the same company made selecting one difficult – what’s the product differentiator other than color and brand name?
But the fun really started when trying to use it, which requires the ‘chalk’ dust to be loaded into the bobbin. But where? The amply sized bubble wrapped cardboard backer did not include a simple drawing showing where to insert the chalk, and being outside with dirty gloves and dirtier overalls didn’t afford an opportunity to check the manufacturer’s web side. Later, after cleaning up, checking the web site showed – nothing, no instructions or picture of where or how the chalk dust is inserted into the bobbin. It took a while, and about half the chalk dust that was included in the packaging, but eventually what was left of the chalk got into the bobbin. There was not a problem of how to use the chalk line; that’s pretty intuitive, and all but, perhaps, one or two homeowners have seen them used. The problem was getting the chalk dust (which isn’t really chalk dust) into the bobbin, which a simple drawing or photo on the packaging could have depicted. After all, not everyone who buys these things in home improvement centers is a construction professional.
Sooner or later, working on home improvement projects will result in scratches and cuts and some blood, which can be taken care of on the spot with Bactine spray. So, why did they change the spray dispenser to require two hands to open the spray nozzle? Are the child drug safety issues so pressing that Bactine’s manufacturer is more concerned with conforming to some bureaucrat’s whims, however well informed and documented by studies in depth, than with a customer’s actual need for the product? It seems absolutely amazing, here in the USofA with its high tech solutions to almost every problem, real or imagined, that a push button sprayer can be screwed up. Instructions on how to open Bactine’s spray dispenser are included in the box, in two paragraphs written in four point type on page three in amazingly turgid CYA-ese. Why make simple things complicated?
And, to close with another lesson, why is it that the throats of liquid point of application dispensers are always considerably smaller than those of their bulk supply containers? It’s as if the designers of these things go to special schools to make easy things complicated.
And here I thought that making things difficult to learn, use and manage were a monopoly of software developers.
© Copyright 2009 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG
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