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Software, Features & Design

"Customers are expert in knowing what they need to accomplish, but not in knowing how software ought to be designed to support their needs. Allowing customers to design software through feature requests is the worst form of disaster by committee." - Stephen Few from Information Dashboard Design

I run into this constantly when it comes to the design of project management or estimating systems. Honestly it is the fault of both the customers and the software designers. The customers "demand" features or else they won't buy the software and the software maker is trying to run a business so they attempt to build the feature into the next version.

I just started reading this book after reading about it in a post by Kathy Sierra that I talked about previously. I am only on page 35 and love it. The pictures of various dashboard displays on the first pages were worth the price of the book alone.

It is interesting to see the differences between dashboards that were built by software companies versus those built by end-users like the "Digital Cockpit" that GE uses. It shows how wide the divide is between how a software engineer thinks versus a manager, executive or business owner.

Posted by David on November 19, 2006 09:46 AM|Permalink

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