barry burton

A Limited Philosophy of Software Development

Technology has become a very complex area. It is my belief that technology professionals should serve to insulate the general population from the myriad protocols and specifications and engineering. To operate a product correctly should not necessitate an understanding of the systems and principles the product is based on. Things should just work, or else provide an intuitive and high level response as to why correct operation is not currently possible.

This has the side effect of making technology professionals gatekeepers. This brings responsibility upon our shoulders but as long as we are willing to take that responsibility, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Lawyers and accountants and architects all serve as gatekeepers for their particular areas of specialty.

So fantastical has the rise of the internet and related technologies been that often these technologies are seen as magical and unbounded. In some sense the future of technology could be seen to be unbounded, at least in terms of dramatic and unforeseeable advances and changes. However, at any given moment there are very real physical bounds imposed by the present computing and networking infrastructures. As such, it is our job to intelligently make tradeoffs, packaging together into a product the best possible set of features that can be made to work together.

Returning to the idea of the gatekeeper, in a realm that is unbounded, a gatekeeper is always seen to be evil, someone who wants to arbitrarily prevent access to good things. Unfortunately, many people view the world of technology as unbounded and so technology professionals who are grounded in reality are seen to be evil guardians who prevent fun. This view is probably primarily promulgated by the technology press which finds it easy to report on features but hard to report on something vague like user experience. While features may generate a quick, sensational popularity, a good user experience will promote lasting goodwill and devoted user based that grows more slowly but is ultimately for more profitable.

Many specific points fall out from this but a few are worth explicit mention now. First and foremost, simplicity is king. Every new technology or feature is one more thing that must be remembered and understood by the user. It is not enough for the new item to merely provide some benefit, that benefit must be greater than the additional memory burden presented by the item. Social media can provide great new avenues of communication for reaching and interacting with customers, but it can also dilute brand and overwhelm customers who just want to simply keep up with something they find interesting. The same goes for any other new technology buzzwords that a user may be sure of needing but in fact add no new capabilities or power.

This brings up another point: there are times when technology professionals must say no to users or clients, but just because what they are asking for will not bring them what they ultimately want. Flash is a good example of this. It is a complex browser plugin that is responsible for more browser crashes than any other reason. It is one more piece of software that a user must keep up to date. However, it provides no new power or functionality. Movies are much better delivered via movie specific codecs, which like Flash necessitate an additional piece of software, but they do what they are supposed to do much better: display movies at much higher quality with fewer bugs and crashes. Animations and interactive visual displays are much better created with Javascript, HTML and CSS, all native browser technologies. This means that there is no additional software to download or that will possibly crash.

In addition, since the browser was designed to do precisely this, the operation is fairly efficient, reserving much processing power and battery life for other functions. Flash on the other hand is quite inefficient at most tasks it is asked to do, meaning longer download times, less available processing power, and increased power consumption. That is if Flash can even be made to run at all. It is not purely marketing that keeps Flash off of nearly all mobile devices. The one argument Flash has in its favor is that the development environment is familiar to many creative professionals who already use Photoshop or Illustrator. Without downplaying this benefit, it is still unacceptable to foist a more poor product on users just because someone does not want to learn how to create a better product.

The iPhone is a perfect counterexample. It uses a very unique development environment that was understood by few people before learning it for iPhone development, but the process is entirely oriented toward producing good products which are efficient and highly usable. So while a new developer faces a steep learning curve, once the environment is learned, great products can be more easily produced, rather than sticking with a easily known environment that was hamstrung to almost always provide mediocre results.

All of this essentially boils down to understanding where your strengths end and weaknesses begin. Sometimes technology professionals understand computational products better and so we do know better. However, this cuts both ways. Most technology professionals have little sense for visual design, so it is important for us to work with visual designers in order to produce the highest caliber products. So there should also be an emphasis on aesthetics, especially as it pertains to design and interaction. Ultimately, this emphasis is driven by a desire to create highly usable products, letting the goal of increasing user happiness guide each design decision.