Why User Experience Should Matter
Much has been said on this topic, by smarter people than me. I won’t attempt an educated version of the topic (as I’m not actually educated in that subject area other than by experience), I have nothing backing this rant other than an ability to empathise with end users and a burning need to Make Things Better.
No-one actually enjoys the daily grind of their job, all the piddly little repetitive actions they must complete in between the bits that keep them turning up to work each day. As a so-called systems developer, I’m in the lucky position to be able to smooth out process-wrinkles, replacing tedious manual tasks with things that the Computer can do for them. A large part of what I do is listen to users complain about their job and the tools they have to do it with. I sort the complaints out into Things I Can Help With, and Personality Issues.
I genuinely care about the user who has to wait 37 seconds for a badly-designed screen to load - I can *feel* how annoying and unproductive that is for the user. I can *understand* how much happier they would be doing their dull repetitive job if they didn’t have that extra annoyance to contend with. So I fix it.
I’m not, and never will be, a fantastic programmer. I don’t actually *want* to be, truth be told. It’s a job I’ve blundered into and feel a constant fraud as I know *genuinely* fantastic programmers. I’m too squeamish to be a doctor or similar - there are certain words I can’t even *hear*, never mind look at. So I play doctor to computer systems. That involves a certain amount of basic programming, and while I’ll never be a luminary, I get by.
I find it difficult to harden my heart against users when they complain about something that ought to be fixable. My view of IT is that we provide the means for other people to do their jobs, and where there are problems, we are the wizards that make the problems go away. We don’t provide direct financial benefits to the company - we don’t sell things and make money. Our worth lies in our ability to make the rest of the business more profitable, and part of that is keeping users happy.
Common sense, and several surveys, have shown that happy users are more productive. I’m generally happier when my computer doesn’t crash several times a day. Even if the problem is more low-grade than that e.g. an application freezing a few times a day and having to be restarted, it still has an impact on how a user feels about doing their job. Yes, it’s easy to restart an application, or reboot the computer, or remember that the printer can only print one copy of a document so you need to click print as many times as you want documents. Individually incidents like these are small and the symptoms are easily treated, but while the underlying cause isn’t addressed, the user feels like they are never going to get better.
I appreciate that IT problems are complicated and may involve a fair amount of trial and error to resolve them, and it may be that the solution to one problem is the cause of another. But that’s why they pay us more than the man who puts the paper in the photocopier - we are paid for our knowledge and experience at solving these problems. Otherwise, it could just as well be an office junior answering the phone and saying ‘just log off and log back on again’. Same result, but much cheaper.
At the end of the day, the IT infrastructure exists to allow the users to make money for the business. Therefore if user experience doesn’t matter to you, you shouldn’t work in IT. Go do something else instead and content yourself with reading BOFH.