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Daring Fireball on keeping software transparent

Daring Fireball: “Once software starts down this path of guessing what it is the user is trying to do, and then doing something special based on that guess, it must guess correctly nearly every time, because the times when it guesses wrong are so annoying that they far outweigh the extra convenience of the times when it guesses right.”



It’s easy to start to concoct ideas about clever things that your software could automatically do, but this is a useful rule of thumb: If you can’t get it right almost all of the time, don’t. Focus on making it easy for users to know exactly what will happen instead.

1 comment

Mike McDerment
 

I have to admit, this is the beauty of software development in the ASP/web2 landscape...you get so much - and such direct - feedback from users that you can make the right move almost all of the time. Developing software pre a web enabled instant feedback loop was infinitely harder because of the distance between developers and users. SAAS closes that gap and benefits both parties. Nice find.
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