“Hello! I am a developer. Here is my relevant experience: I code in Hoobijag and sometimes jabbernocks and of course ABCDE++++ (but never ABCDE+/^+ are you kidding? ha!) and I like working with Shoobababoo and occasionally kleptomitrons. I’ve gotten to work for Company1 doing Shoobaboo-ing code things and that’s what led me to the Snarfus. So, let’s dive in!
At least once in their life, every tech person should be forced to teach someone like my mum how to use a piece of technology.
That will very quickly change your perspective on what counts as user friendly.
I taught basic computer literacy. I am a software developer. It’s tough to reframe my own knowledge so drastically, but the new perspective also makes me question why so many things are wrong with current tech (particularly UI/UX).
Oh definitely, there’s so many products we use that are far more complicated than they have any need to be.
Vehicles and appliances are two examples that come to mind.
My peeve is products made “easy” to use, in a way that makes explaining them extremely difficult. Two top examples are:
URL bar in browsers which doubles as a search bar. Good luck explaining why if you type in an exact existing address, you will get there, but otherwise (typo, extra space), you will end up on Google.
Apple’s iMessage. Your message will be sent to your contact using one of three protocols: SMS/MMS, iMessage or RCS. This is almost entirely opaque, and I even had to explain to a tech-savvy person why videos they send me look like blobs.
I just want a friendly user :(
I think the issue is that you need to understand who your users actually are. Documentation for a library intended to be used by a reasonably competent software engineer is going to have different requirements vs documentation for a cli utility aimed at Arch btw Linux users vs documentation for a program to help Grandma organize family photos.
If you throw a terminal command at Grandma she’s going to panic and call her grandchild. If you put instructions for extracting a tarball in your library docs the programmer is going to get bored and skip ahead.