And you are here why?

“I don’t need requirements — I know what I’m doing” —  #CowboyDeveloper A paraphrased version of an actual PR-related discussion I had recently follows. And yes, I’ve had this conversation more than once in my career — there are a  lot  of #TechBros out there  . Hey Bob (let’s just call him Bob), I wanted to talk about this PR you just submitted. Specifically, this bit in the config file —  e nable_network_console: # Yes | No  — care to explain it?¹ Oh, I see, most of the users don’t want the network console, but some might? So you’ve got that in there, just in case anybody wants to enable it? Cool, cool. One more question though — why do we even have a network console in the first place? I mean, I was looking at the requirements behind this PR, and I don’t actually see anything about network consoles, let alone enabling/disabling them, y’know? Oh, right, you thought it might be a useful feature, so you put it in there. Make sense. And they’re not in the requ...

Have you ever though about the needs and behaviors of the   casual user ? Oh, we do any amount of work for our target customer, but what about people who just user your system a few times? What makes them stick? Or want to come back? Or, even worse, not complain about your product to all and sundry? The thing is, we’ve gotten somewhat good at designing for our target customer — or people who we want to become our target customer — but   we’ve also gotten very good at not thinking about drive-by users . The problem here tends to be that things that incent power users tend to have the exact opposite effect on casual users! • “Power-user” features can be incredibly useful to, well, power-users, but to the rest of the world they are just another barrier to actually get things done. What’s worse, it makes them feel   uncool , and if they have agency, they’ll probably check-out • Status-markers can be great for users (“ you have completed 85% of your profile ”), but tu...