Looking back, Looking ahead, and Moving on

Whoah, it's been almost 2 months since my last posts.

Reason
I have joined a new company last month, so it's been quite busy with the new work items, however unfortunately, haven't really played much with programming lately, I was assigned to do some migrations, so more manual works have to be done on that ;)

Looking Back

Well, I would say that I started blogging more frequently since a year ago, and most of them were related to BizTalk. It's been fun indeed, thinking the cases / scenarios where we want them to be implemented using Biztalk. And the number of times I have to explain : "NO, it doesn't work that way, the receive location and the send port are not directly linked to each other, there is a message box in the middle of those two and bla bla bla" I'm gonna miss that though haha :P

Looking Ahead

The role that I have in the new company is still my favorite one : DEVELOPER, can't get enough of it really haha, glad that I'm going to learn new stuffs and understand the business side as well, i guess that's the upside of moving from one company to another, you'll face similar but different problems ;) however I don't think I will be blogging about BizTalk anymore for the time being, because the work will be more on .Net and SQL :)

Moving On

Just when blogger actually added inline comments as a feature, for a particular reason I need to move my blog activities to other site :| just to let you know that I will be blogging at http://bembengarifin.wordpress.com/,

The purpose stays the same, to post all the gotchas that i found in software development, so you don't spend hours/days like I did to solve the issue and can have more times to spend with your family and friends :)

I would like to thank you for visiting this blog and I'll see you on the other site ;)

User Interaction, Behavior, and Feedback

Warning : Non technical stuff content ;)

I stumbled upon Jeff Atwood's blog post on UsWare vs. ThemWare 2 days ago. The terms was originally from Eric Sink's blog post on Yours, Mine and Ours. It is a good advice and a very relevant on what we do today as a software developer.

User Interaction
In the first project as a software developer, I was indeed developing software as ThemWare. Why? Because I only knew how to code and test the software with my very own perspective which was more less as long as this page is working (able to display, save, edit, and delete), I'm done with it :p
Then as the program went live, I was there sitting beside the user using the application to make sure everything is going fine.
Well, guess what, the application caused a very long queue of the customers in peak hours and i could see from their faces that they were not tolerant for waiting that long :p
Reason : it was a new application for the users, even though they had the trainings but the load are obviously different compared to peak hours, "panic" mode is ON and made things worse when you can't do things as fast as before using the new application.
At the end of the day, I got some "major" feedbacks from the users which i can clearly understand because i was sitting with them whole day :
1. The page navigation was bad, too many steps to follow in order to do a transaction
2. All have to be done by mouse, they need keyboard short cuts and use tabs so they can do one transaction faster.
3. Too many post backs in the page and the page is too long, so they have to scroll down again and again.

So I did a quick major changes based on those things and that really helped the users afterwards and i was really glad that my program can really help to increase their productivity, that is why we create softwares right? To increase job productivity and efficiency :)

From those experiences, i keep trying to also see things from a user perspective when developing applications, making it as easy as possible to do things.

So don't just make the things work, but make them USABLE as well by creating the UsWare software ;)

User Behavior
I believe that the assumption that the user will use the program as we expect is totally WRONG. For example, as the developer of the program X, I certainly know that after I do (A), I won't do (B). But that may not apply to the users, if we don't put any validations or clear steps to prevent that, it is always a big chance that they will actually do that ;p
It is always hard to predict the user behavior, but adding some thoughts of the variation of possible use case scenarios will be very helpful :) It will be much more costly to handle problems when it happens in production later.

User Feedback
I feel that it is very important to listen to user feedback, because they are the one who are using the software. However, do make a deep consideration or have some discussions first before following and making any changes.
Reasons :
1. There are some cases where after a change has been done, then turns out that it makes things worse or at least not helping.
2. YAGNI (You ain't gonna need it) or you ain't gonna use it
But in any cases, if you receive feedbacks from the users, that means a good thing, they are really using the application :)

For me, I always feel really happy when a user come back to me and said "Thank you, you just make my life easier with that" :)