Re:Whitespace killed an enterprise app
by magicalhippo on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @12:02PM
(#19154522)
I often find that it's not that they lie, it's that they're often trying to come up with solutions and present those, rather than explaining the root problem.
But yes, watching them work is invaluable. First time I visited one of our clients, I noticed two issues that I had no idea of:
1. All users had dual-monitors, and maximized our application across both. Our application is MDI still. This was a very bad fit for dialogs that were (for historical reasons) had the default position set to center-of-application, rather than center-of-screen. Try reading a dialog split right across two monitors. So when I got back I immediately did a pass to make them all center-of-screen.
2. When doing the main data entry, they didn't look a the window they were entering data into, but rather the source material. Thus any additional controls or dialog would mess up their workflow big-time. That's when it really hit me why the user interface for that window was rather clunky...
But yes, watching them work is invaluable. First time I visited one of our clients, I noticed two issues that I had no idea of:
1. All users had dual-monitors, and maximized our application across both. Our application is MDI still. This was a very bad fit for dialogs that were (for historical reasons) had the default position set to center-of-application, rather than center-of-screen. Try reading a dialog split right across two monitors. So when I got back I immediately did a pass to make them all center-of-screen.
2. When doing the main data entry, they didn't look a the window they were entering data into, but rather the source material. Thus any additional controls or dialog would mess up their workflow big-time. That's when it really hit me why the user interface for that window was rather clunky...