Title: Making Opinionated Software
Context: You can’t please all of the people all of the time, as every software designer is more than aware.
Synopsis: One of the unspoken skills any software designer must have is a skin of elephant grade thickness capable of withstanding withering criticism from the very people you build your product for in the first place. I am sure they are all very welcome by the way. We can be at turns stupid, moronic, ignorant, and incompetent along a sliding scale relative to the scope of our abject failure to do our job properly, or even at all. The fact that much of the software people use on a day to day basis is free (or thereabouts) has only served to ratchet up the end-user vitriol it seems. The concept of “you get what you pay for” no longer applies when software is ubiquitous and attention is divided into nanoseconds. As do all others who toil in the creative workspace, we too are bound to spend at least some time in the critics’ doghouse suffering for our art. But design we must, searching, waiting, hoping for the fleeting moment when we hear the words we long for: “Wow, this software almost doesn’t totally suck.”
Best Bit: “Often, designing safely means making decisions that don’t make you happy personally. You include a feature so that someone else will like it.”
via mantia.me
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