The first time I used a computer was back in high school. It was a Commodore PET. My friend Kendall and I used to type in simple programs that were kindly left in the “computer room”.

The only really interesting thing, which in restrospect helps me to understand the complete helplessness that some people feel when confronted with computers, was that we didn’t know that the shift key could be held down for any length of time. So whenever we wanted to type in a capital letter we would attempt to press the shift key at exactly the same time as the letter. About one out of every four or five attempts would result in a capital letter. This was a bit frustrating, but this is what computers were like and we liked computers so we just put up with it.

It was many months before someone noticed our novel technique and told us the secret. More than twenty years have passed and the memory is still fresh. I hope that some of the clumsy UI’s I’ve contributed to over the years haven’t created such angst. If they have, sorry. I do know what it feels like.

Yesterday I finished a quick and pretty crappy prototype of a J2ME application for use by customers on their phones. After years of building server applications in which it is normal to have complete control (or at least full knowledge) of the software and hardware environment it was strange to be operating in a space in which the application will need to be tested on each type of handset before we can safely assume it will work.

It was even stranger to be operating in such a resource constrained environment as a phone. It feels a bit like programming under Windows 3.x - at any stage something could go wrong, and heaven forbid that you try to use too much RAM or expect that your application will be left alone to just do its thing.

All up it was fun and I’m looking forward finishing it off over the coming weeks. However, I’m not looking forward to the testing and problem solving when we find it doesn’t work on some phone or other (or worse it doesn’t work on some phone or other on a particular network).

A while back I linked to a favourite software development analogy of mine -broken windows. Yesterday I encountered an example of this theory that caused a manager to almost give up.

The company I’m currently consulting with has developed a hardware and software package that allows detailed analysis of complex data. The user interface for the software contains many quirks that make it challenging for first-time or casual users. One of the company’s managers was talking to me in general about the difficulty of getting these problems sorted out and specifically about an import screen in which the user is asked if she wants to “split” the data even though splitting is necessary in 95% of cases. It is quite common for users to not check the split option which results in unintuitive behaviour.

The manager said that its not really worth fixing the “split screen” since there are other things just as confusing all over the system. I guess, using the analogy, he was saying that there’s no use fixing this one broken window since there are another dozen or so broken on the other side of the building.

There isn’t a moral to this story or a happy ending (yet).

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