We’ve officially launched the 1.0 release of a piece of software at work that I’ve been personally working on for about a year and a half. I wish I could go into detail about what the software does, but I’m not up to speed on what I am and am not allowed to say about it since it’s an internal piece of software for the company right now. Sorry about the vagueness, but hopefully it doesn’t detract from the point.
Anyway, I’ve been spending the last couple days training new technicians and engineers and things have been going really well. It’s so satisfying to see new people use the software you write and to see how they interact with it, what parts of it confuse them as well as what things just work perfectly. In a way these past couple days have been the first metric our small, 3 person, software development team has had to judge the success of our work. You become so enveloped in a project when you work on it for a long period of time that everything about it makes sense to you, the way the software is working is a small slice of how your head works and thinks. Because of that, you lose sight of what challenges many users will be facing when using the software. I think this is one of the greatest challenges our team faced throughout the development of our project.
Today I’ve confirmed that, for the most part, we were successful. We conducted two training sessions today. The first one went along smoothly, people asked questions, were impressed by our ideas and the execution of them in the software. Overall they seemed to be surprised by the quality of our work. That was pretty satisfying, but what really made my day was a comment that someone made in our second, post lunch hour, training session.
We spent countless hours optimizing and rethinking the user interface of this program to make as logical as possible. We had plenty of meetings where we were discussing something as ridiculous as whether to display something as a combo box or to display a set of radio buttons instead.
We really tried to think of how to make the user interface as usable as possible. In the second training session, while explaining the second or third major topic of discussion, someone stopped the presenter and said something along the lines of: “Are all the controls and operations going to be this intuitive? If so, can we just play with it instead?” JACKPOT. It was possibly the coolest thing I had ever heard someone say about something I had put so much work into. It gave me this feeling of irrevocable pride and accomplishment. Definitely made my day.
go you!
the new pictures at the top are sweet, did you take those recently?
Most of the pictures are just from my photo collection, I think only one of them was taken in the last 3 months. Its the one with the graffitied power-box-thingy, which turned out to be a pretty cool picture.