To choke a monkey and other power user design concepts

Ah the fun of designing software. No, not writing software but actually designing the behavior to work the way that user would expect it to work. No, not Microsoft’s misleading marketing campaign. I am talking about the concept of putting in traps in your software to catch the stupid things people would do and more importantly what they were trying to do.

It really is an art form. For example, I put a search form at the top of each page and threw away all my preconceptions about what I would do. After all, I am not a field tech so what do I know about trouble ticket management? I figured they would look for a company name, for email addresses, for ticket tracking numbers..

What did I actually get?

First and foremost, a long list of profanities. Yes, really. While at the ticket display screen or contact contact info people would scribble in things that I do not imagine were a part of the conversation. They put in phone numbers, passwords, notes to self and just amusing notes to pass the time.

So the lesson here? When designing management systems put in some stress relief code. I can only phantom that people were so utterly bored with the person they were trying to help that they must have been banging their head against the monitor to come up with the vile things that got posted back to the server. I am seriously considering having an iframe somewhere in the page that loads pictures of serene landscapes. Give it some feng-shui to help IT folks put up with the customers without the rage. I can see the future of my preferences system now.. “which color relaxes you the most? which one infuriates you? Virtually choking the monkey – relaxing, fun or cruel?” 

Most systems prompt you to pick your prefered date display format. Mine wonders about choking monkeys. Talk about personal software!