Application Worries

    People who create applications have a lot of power. As we all know, with great power comes great responsibility. But it really is true in the case of user experience. User experience is what defines how people really feel emotionally about your program. It tells them whether or not to use it again; whether to trust the people who created it; it expresses a deep connection that may live on or die at first glance. I would like to dispel a few myths that seem to come up time and time again when creating a so called standard application.

Myth 1. Installations: Accounting for custom options

The great myth of applications, at least those downloaded, are in installers. Installations allow the user to select where they want the program to be installed as well as custom options to enable or disable. I believe that this is simply flat out wrong, even insulting to the user. It's time we install it like it should be and provide practical solutions over customized choices. Removing programs should be as simple as deleting an icon. Using programs should be as simple as going to it.

The second myth of applications is that pictures speak louder than words. But the problem with that is almost all application icons have no meaning to us at all. A picture is worth a thousand words only if we create it as users. People understand words, much quicker than icons - so always provide that first.

Menus have been around since the beginning of GUI-based operating systems. But if we stop to think about how many times a user actually navigates to a menu we may realize that they provide an almost completely intolerable solution to making the program do what you want it to do.

Confirmation dialogs are another major myth in creating so-called standard applications. Confirmations not only insult the user's intelligence, but they indicate that once you've done it there's no going back. Always let your users undo and redo what they've done.

Our content is precious to us as users. We adore it because it's ours. But it's understandable to want to have a save feature because as users we're not ready to showcase it to the world. It's like a rough draft. But what happens when our computer crashes, something unexpected happens. Our content is at risk of being lost. Never ask the user to save when you mean to ask if they're done. Saving needs to be automatic Don't expose the user's content to everybody though; it's their content - they just simply aren't done with it yet.