[HTCondor-users] Stop making users explore

[Miha Ahronovitz <myinnervoice@xxxxxxxxx>]

Please don't shoot me.

This is the title of a blog entry ÂUser Know, a widely read user experience blog:

http://usersknow.blogspot.com/2013/10/stop-making-users-explore.html?utm_source=meetup_lscsf&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=lsc_newsletter_11-11-2013

This group is highly interesting as every sysadmin can mold solutions never envisaged before. But is this good foruser experience?

Let's quote the author:

Nobody cares about your product. Fundamentally, what users care about is themselves. They are using your product as a means to an end. We knew this back in 1960 when Theodore Levitt explained that when customers buy quarter inch drills, they really are buying quarter inch holes.

I can see almost all thread are about holes that are nor quarter inch holes

People want whatever your product promises to do for them, and they want it to happen as quickly and easily as possible .... They donât want to delve deeply into the mysteries of your To Do List software. They want to not miss deadlines.

What about highly technical, B2B software? User Experience. No one worried much about it 30 years ago, because computers were hard to use anyway - and clusters were almost impossible to use by Joe-Shmo's

I know, I know. B2B products are different! Theyâre more complex! They have so many features! They require training and exploration!

Nonsense.

All of those incredibly complicated, feature-dense pieces of B2B software that require weeks of training are getting disrupted by things that humans actually understand. I worked with a company that required all documents be shared by filing a ticket with IT to create a personal folder on a shared server which then required mounting a new drive onto the desktop and...blah blah blah. Everybody just used Dropbox, even though it was officially forbidden by the company.

The fact is, people in big companies are forced to work with dozens of complicated products every single day. The introduction of a new, complicated product does not instill in them the desire to spend a lot of their day exploring it. It tends to make them sigh resignedly and figure out if there is some way to avoid learning the new system until it goes away and is replaced by something else.

I am just sharing Âthese thoughts. ÂI discovered that Open Source projects must remain Open Source, but there is a bad need for cross pollination with proprietary releases based on open source. This is happening in Open Source R project, for exampleÂ

Cheers,

Miha

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Miha Ahronovitz