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To choke a monkey and other power user design concepts
Posted: 7:05 pm July 30th, 2006	Post a comment Shockey Monkey

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!

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8 Comments

Karl Palachuk | July 30th, 2006 at 7:52 pm

When I was back at the University of Michigan, their mainframe system was all text-based.

If you got frustrated and entered in certain words, the system would come back with “Tsk tsk. You shouldn’t use such language.”

Carlos Taria | July 30th, 2006 at 10:44 pm

I want that punch the monkey banner on the top instead of search

Allen | July 30th, 2006 at 11:58 pm

It wasnt one of my folks? They are supposed to be updating tickets with call contents not goofing with the application.

Ian | July 31st, 2006 at 12:10 pm

I’ve really been loving the SM beta. It is so fast and so easy that I cannot imagine my business without it.

Scott | July 31st, 2006 at 12:58 pm

Adding on to Ian’s comments.

What Vlad has done with SM in such a short time is just amazing. Whats even better is that he is actively taking (and learning it appears) what makes the SMB practice work.

Not everyone fits into CRM we need something more focused. SM is the answer!

Eric | July 31st, 2006 at 2:38 pm

Ditto, love Shockey Monkey. I know Vlad is working on this very hard and if he can ship this by SMB Nation.. wow. I will tell everyone about it. I’ve got a lot of faith in things he works on based on the track record I don’t think that the high end products stand a chance against this in the SBSC category. They just aren’t designed for it, they are enterprise monitoring and management crammed down to the smallbiz in a very obvious way. Wonder if Microsoft learns from their mistakes or does the exact same “MOM for Children” approach.

AdamK | July 31st, 2006 at 3:06 pm

So for us down under do you intend for this to become international at all or just US based like all the others? I really hope you consider making something world-wide.

Looking over what you’re working on and I am asking what you intend to have done by SMB Nation…

Richard Tocci | August 1st, 2006 at 1:12 pm

The problem with designing software is that developers generally have no idea how a user actually does the work. They only know they need a form where fields will go, and then the end user will be expected to do the rest. The data is transported into a database, and another interface is required to display that information to yet another user.

Designing software is an artform, but like anything else, it can be learned. The best thing you can do is to ask a user how THEY think it should look. Ask many users. Don’t show them screenshots of stuff you’ve created. Let THEM show YOU what it should look like. Then code around that.

This was never really a problem on text-based interfaces, because, well, there was only text. Graphics puts a whole new twist on software development. I think you will find that the majority of users will want it as simple as possible. Sure, you’ll have a few uber-geekazoids (like me) that will want bells, whistels, alarms, escalators, and tea at 3, but most don’t. They want it simple. Why? Because they have enough to worry about during the day than having to work on a clunky interface.

KISS…it’s a mantra we should all remember…

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