Know your end users

On a Saturday morning, I went to a bank to do some over the counter transaction. I was attended by a customer service staff who used a Dell desktop computer with an LCD monitor.

My request takes many forms to be filled and a lot of data entries to be made to the system. I couldn't see the monitor, but I just imagine by looking at how busy the female banker was entering data using the keyboard. Surprisingly, she didn't use the mouse at all and rely entirely on the keyboard and its function keys (F1-F12). The mouse is connected to the computer, but she put it in front of the keyboard so I believe she just want to make some space by getting rid of it.

On another ocassion in a travel agency, I notice a diffent balance between keyboard and mouse usage. I was booking for an airline ticket and the staff attending me used both keyboard and mouse. However, he used the keyboard much more frequently to enter not-so-user-friendly commands on the terminal window and only few times used the mouse to click on the big toolbar located on top of the terminal window. Perhaps the toolbar is used to execute a simple command like 'Print Flight Itinerary'.

Drawing from the two short scenarios above, we can see that different users have different way to use the application. Naturally, the platform of an application defines its limitation, like in a terminal window where everything is text, keyboard is definitely the main input device. However, in most today's applications, desktop-based or web-based, the mouse and the keyboard are both acceptable input devices. But still many people choose to mainly use keyboard alone. They do have valid reasons, most probably because they are so familiar with the keyboard and therefore can operate faster compared to using the mouse.

It is paramount for us, the software developers, to know the behaviour of the end users who will actually use the application we build. Imagine if we develop a cool interactive web application, fully enriched with DHTML popups, animations, and drag and drops, only to realize later after the release that the users prefer to navigate using combinations of keyboard arrows and tabs rather than the mouse.

I highly recommend developers, who spent most of the time behind the stage, to come out from their cubicle and pay a visit to client office. Look at how your end users use the application that you build. I bet you will be surprised and it may change the way you design and develop your application.

A del.icio.us way to search

A simple idea turned into a great web application, that's what I like about del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is an online bookmark repository. Instead of adding your favourite urls to the browser's bookmark, you can post them to Del.icio.us and access them from any computers on the web. Simple concept, but that's not all. You can also search what other people bookmark and see how popular those bookmarks are.

Again, the power of virtual community is used here to leverage the usefulness of the site. The more people use Del.icio.us to post their bookmarks, the bigger the bookmark repository, and more useful search result can be returned. I believe Del.icio.us is waiting for that critical mass moment to happens, before they can truly reap the profit of running this service.

Alas, Del.icio.us' infrastructure doesn't seem to cope well with the site growth. In the past few weeks, the site was down several times due to power failures in their colocation servers. These issues should be taken care seriously before people giving up and turning to alternative sites.

Infrastructure issue aside, it is a great experience to use Del.icio.us on my daily surfing activity. I use the site to:

• Manage my bookmarks. I surf at work and home, so having a single bookmark repository is really helpful. Assigning tags also helps me to categorize the bookmarks based on the keyword, which I find is easier to remember than file system-like structure in the classic bookmark system.
• Share my technical bookmarks to my colleagues more easily. Just point them to my Del.icio.us url. No need to cut and paste the link in the email or IM. However, privacy is a big concern here because they can also get my personal bookmarks
• Do search on the internet. See what other people bookmarking! Think Del.icio.us as an alternative to Google search.
• Learn about the web interface... simple but powerful. More about this in the next post.

Other that privacy issue, my other concern is if some people start to misuse the system by posting urls for advertising rather than their actual bookmarks. More and more people post the same url, the more popular the bookmark is. This will taint the usefulness of the site as an alternative way to search the Internet.