Steve Krug on The Least You Can Do About Usability

Tim Lister, the author of Peopleware, spent a couple of days at Red Gate last week. I was slightly nervous – Tim’s last visit culminated in my group haranguing by thirty developers, testers, designers and technical authors following Tim’s excellent, concise and witty summary of all Red Gate’s – and, implicitly, my – failings.

It was worth it though. In the year and a half since Tim was last here we’ve implemented many of his recommendations. We got rid of project team bonuses, improved our project approval process and hired six more people to join our user experience team. Sure, we’re not perfect, but we’re a lot better than last year.

One thing that Tim noticed was how articulate and passionate our development team is. According to Tim,

“Software development is about informed argument. Arguing about what the product is, and how exactly it’s going to do it, is fundamental to building a product that people will pay real money for.”

But although articulateness and passion produce better quality arguments, and hence better software, they also have a bastard cousin: obstinacy. As Tim said,

“Obstinacy is “I know the best about everything”, which comes from a child’s view of the world. Being obstinate is friction. It’s wasted energy. We need a definition of what is valid debate and what is obstinacy: the debate has to come to closure. You win some, you lose some, but you need to move on.”

Tim also made the excellent point that individual team members, especially developers, need to de-optimize themselves to optimize the team. The aim isn’t to get developers developing in the most efficient way: it’s to deliver a complete product. An individual developer might need to sacrifice some personal productivity for the benefit of the overall project. He might need to change the way he works, or throw away some code, or go off and do something else for a bit, so a tester can test sooner or better and the project can run quicker.

Which leads me to this week’s question of the week. If there was one thing you could change about the way you write software, what would it be? And what’s stopping you? $20 for the best answer. Post here.