Whole lotta love

[azurelunatic]

I have the best end-user beta-tester EVER.

She makes all the n00b mistakes.
She tells me what she's done.
She knows her skill level with computers and blames herself, not me or the program.
♥

Comments

[onyxrising.livejournal.com]

Apparently IT at work loves me for similar reasons.
There was a computer error shutting down all the computers on my end. I was surrounded by geeks, who immediately started insising to IT that they knew exactly what virus it was, and demanding IT treat it as such.
I handed IT a list of what happened, in what order, including any of the stupid things I did. Result? It got fixed, and I got a thankyou note for IT for being the only person who gave them info relevant to the problem.

[azurelunatic]

Yay!

[juuro.livejournal.com]

"...blames herself, not me or the program."

Umm... I'm not sure this is unambiguously a good thing. If the tester is representative of the target group of the product, then the mistakes she makes in interpreting the program are not hers; if the user expectations differ from the programmer assumptions, then I say the programmer failed to make the user expect the right thing.

[azurelunatic]

At my workplace, with the userbase I work with, the typical user attitude to a program that does not work as expected is "Why won't this damn thing ever work right? $PROGRAMMER isn't good for anything!"

Until I can make the item almost completely self-explanatory and intuitive for them to use, I haven't done my job *right* and I know it. But I don't know what their assumptions are, quite. In her mistakes, she's showing me. I now know that in addition to having a separate area to work on each job, I need to break down the UI by having all the fields to fill in from each source document together, in the order that they are in on the source document, and I need to have fields protected so that only deliberate sabotage on the part of the user will remove formulas, instead of having it unprotected and where a random keypush could overwrite.

There's a very distinct difference between what I consider usable for myself and what is actually usable for them, and she's helping me discover this by how she mangles the spreadsheet.

[juuro.livejournal.com]

Thank you for taking the time for this explanation. It is again obvious that your attitudes and priorities are right; moreover, this way of gathering user requirements is known to be very useful, although it is lamentably seldom used fully.

[azurelunatic]

I have to use these things myself, and I have to work with these people, so it's in my best interests to get it right as well. I was taught good programming practice, and while I haven't had much time to apply it, I haven't had much time to learn bad habits either.