where's my DOS prompt?

Back in the 1980s during a PC-Expo in New York, I was on a panel with Bill Gates. I was, at the time, working for AEtna Insurance.  The panel was about software and the enterprise. At one point, he made the comment about how pleased he was that software was getting easier and he was particularly proud of getting away from the DOS prompt, real help when the F1 key was pressed.

I was sitting to his right and, after he was finished, was offered a chance to comment. I said some nice things about Windows versus straight DOS and then made the observation that it might be possible software was getting more complex not easier especially if we were all commenting and high fiving the growth of help files. I asked Mr. Gates if he thought measuring the ease of use by how little help was needed was a good goal and should developers who say it’s easy, be tracked by the F1 presses and big help files.

I got two things.

1. The “you have to be the dumbest turd on the planet and I’d like to shine my shoes with your face but I can’t because AEtna buys boatloads of my stuff,” look.

2. A short answer about making software easier is always an important job with never ending, yadda yadda..

I also set my hiring into Microsoft back by two years, at least, but that’s another story.

Fast forward to today.

Many of you may have the new Windows Live Messenger Beta. I believe, since my daughters, friends, and others have it, this baby is rolling forward. Great. And has been reported in a million places, the file sharing feature, ala Foldershare is in the product. 

Well, as for making it easier? There is an Sharing Assistant tool you can down load if you have problems with the file sharing part of Messenger. This is probably the most scary ‘help’ tool, I’ve seen in a long time. warnings about loosing data, sending personal information to Microsoft, stopping this, enabling that, etc.  Yes, I understand it’s beta and yes I totally understand most users will never this this. Almost never until somebody tells them to down load this to troubleshoot a problem.  It is a 9 step spooky thing. Again, I know it’s beta and I know the dev team is trying to get data to fix problems. 

However:

This beta product and this ‘assistant’ are representative, I think, of some really interesting things with respect to software expectations within the eyes of users.

It used to be that people would go nuts over bugs, demand the end of 401 errors, despise the ctrl-alt-del combo and, in general demand some level of quality and predictability.

Today, I fear, you can slap beta on any web service or software, warn people that their hard drive could explode and simply sit back and wait for the smoke test. “Beta” appears to be sort of free pass to ship stuff and let the users help sort things out along the way.  I’m not saying this is good or bad, but something tells me we are going to reach a point where this is going to back fire in a really bad way.

At least with Delete *.* and ARE YOU SURE Y/N?, the moron ratio was reasonably under control.  This assistant stuff? Dunno, go read the full instructions and you decide as I could be wrong.

Comments

[Adam]

Being involved in product day in and day out, yet not having the experience to know better, I'd say the smoke test is a good thing. Especially with automated feedback agents in place.

I'd love to be able to get a high-level (and low-level) view into how the product I'm working on is being used, good (product is rocking) or bad (product is sucking). Especially when it is in Beta.

I think there is a "big brother" feeling with the feedback agents, so maybe I'm just naive for enabling it. But, what do I have to hide? It's not like I'm plotting the next Enron scandle on my Thinkpad -- and if the Product Manager for Live Messenger gets data from my use that will help make the product better, that's awesome.

Just my 2 cents.

[J. Shirley]

I absolutely agree with you about help systems. When I was building a piece of my site, it got to be a pretty difficult interface and was discussing the idea with my mom, who is a fantastic judge of suckiness. She's a director of a tech support department, and has a good idea of what users feel about certain things (very hands on).

After a lot of discussion, she stated that if an interface needs help or wizard, always take help. Wizards will destroy functionality. I came up with an idea of having assistants (AJAX based assistant dialogs that can interact with elements on the screen) and coded up some prototypes. It does make it easier, but she found that it would be something that users would rely on and would never actually figure out the proper way of doing something. There is no way a wizard or assistant can truly account for all activities, and as such I would end up with a much higher customer contact rate for these features.

I grudgingly agreed, and started rebuilding the interfaces so that they were very simple and component-based so that encapsulation was possible. After probably 3-4 weeks of reworking the interface and having something solid I showed it to some other folks. The feedback was great, and I could tell that non-geek folks would be able to use it without wizards, assistants or massive helpfiles. Simple glossary functions that help people understand the unfamiliar terms was enough (I have this on my tag system on restaurant profile pages now, the "What's this?" links)

I think you were spot on, and I am going to continue to design software to be usable without needing a manual.

"Software without Manuals" ... nice ring to it, I think.

Thanks for the other VC/biz writeups, Rick, I always enjoy reading what you have to say.

-J

[Josh Einstein]

I think living in a perpetual open beta state (cough...Google...cough) is very bad and in fact, I am particularly sensitive about the quality of my betas. I've been using TEO 3.0 for months and I could have put a beta out months ago but I am so worried about making a great first impression that I wouldn't dare release it until I thought it was ready for prime time. In other words, my idea of a "beta" is more like a "release candidate".

Don't get me wrong, as a developer, I love having access to things like Visual Studio a year or more before they're final. I can live with it. But power users and regular users are very different and have very different expectations.