tuesdayDeveloper;

If you read what I’ve written before, you know my answer to this question: a touch-ready system must be built for touch, not keyboard and mouse, from the beginning, but that doesn’t mean that the two can be closely synchronized.

While I would prefer one touch-based system to run on all of my devices (which may or may not ever really happen) because that makes things easier to use, I understand that that is rather hard to develop. There is a reason why the iPad is so limited and it really boils down to the battery and processing power.

You may say that it is limited because it is a touch-based OS, I disagree. There is no reason why any software, program, or system that runs now on a desktop OS cannot run on a touch-based OS. True, I wouldn’t want to see the current iteration of some pieces of software on a touch-based tablet, but after it is redesigned for touch input any piece of software on a touch-based system can do the same things that a piece of software can do on a mouse and keyboard system.

In the mean time, there seems to be something on the horizon coming from Apple. Now most people are saying that this will automatically change from one OS to another and (as in the article cited) I agree that this could be implemented poorly, but there could be a way to make it work well. Imagine editing a document in Pages (for thous of you who aren’t fortunate enough to enjoy Pages, it’s a word processor that in my book is a pleasure to use, but that’s my opinion) on Mac OS X and then thinking to yourself about how tired you are of moving your mouse around all the time. You think to yourself, wouldn’t it be easier if I could just touch the place in the paragraph where I need to edit. With this new system you would just pull the screen towards you, it automatically changes to iOS with Pages running, and you start tapping away at the screen and editing as you were before. You could seam to OSs together without a seam. Now, I hope that this patent means that Apple is working on a desktop-touch-based OS, but if nothing else I think that this idea could work.

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Source: v100rocks.com

If you search “Hate Computers” on Google… you get some interesting results (even more image results). It shouldn’t be surprising, I don’t know about everyone else, but I hear people all the time saying they are not computer people, or they can never get computers to do what they want it to do, or computers and them just don’t get along. In fact there have been a few times when people have looked at me with what can only be called adoration because they “could never do that.” Really, it’s a good thing computers aren’t sentient or we’d probably have a computer revolt on our hands. Even I myself, who is kind and good to all technology, have had the occasional urge to break my [insert tech gadget here] over my knee because the thing wouldn’t do what I wanted it to. I’ve never really thought about the animosity the human race has towards computers until just recently, but I’ve come to a enlightening realization.

There is a central reason people don’t like computers (or aren’t computer people). It’s not because computers are hard to learn or because computers hate them or any reason like that. The reason people don’t like computers is because someone with a job like mine didn’t do their job right.

Make no mistake, the reason why people hate anything from computers to smart phones, from remote controls to cars, from radios to fancy blenders, and whatever else is because they were poorly designed. If all programmers, software designers and engineers, hardware designer and engineers, etc. designed their software and technology gadgets correctly, everyone would love computers. There is only one problem—designing technology is a hard thing to do.

There is never any telling what the right configuration is when you’re designing software for other people—if there are two people, they will inevitably want the same software solution to be different than the other. So what’s a programmer to do? Understand usability.

Usability is the most important aspect of technology design.

There are a lot of good recourses to learn usability. My absolute favorite recourse for usability is Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. (I’ve been wanting to read Rocket Surgery Made Easy, also by Steve Krug, for a while too, but I haven’t yet.) Don’t Make Me Think is an excellent recourse for simplifying things on your website or application. I wish that every developer would read it.

I think that above all, what we as developers need to do is think like our user base, but that’s not enough, we have to ask them what they want and how they want it. Once we’ve developed it, we need to ask them if we did it right.

What do you think?

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