What I mean by App Literacy is how well you understand an application from a user's point of view.
As a developer, you are always building features for those less technical than you are. Those who embrace this can build great software, those who do not will mostly spend their time on the technical fads and baubles that come and go.
The first step to understanding users (it is only the first step) is to understand the system you are working on, understand the words people use for it, understand the real life problems it is solving (or trying to solve), and understand the people that it is trying to help.
In fact, making a complicated thing seem simple takes time and patience to accomplish. Handing a team a complicated problem and the directive, "Make it simple." will likely lead to disappointment. This is especially true if that is the only directive you give them.
It is users of a system who are best equipped to tell you what's simple. If you are designing a new system it won't have any users until you're ready to show someone something.
That isn't a Catch-22 unless you make it one.
This is front-of-mind for me because I am using Ghost and it is simple. But would it be so simple if it weren't for it's forebears in the CMS and blog world?
This in no way diminishes the achievement - being able to see how to make something simple, and deciding to do something about it, is not something everyone can do.
I have 40 years of air travel expectations and all of it includes a tray table. If you're going to try and change that expectation you have to let me know, and you have to give me the option to pay more to have my expectations met.
You can't just make the tray tables go away. Business travelers need a tray table to work. We can't all listen to music or watch iPads.
Yes, they can make them go away. They did.
UPDATE:
So, it turns out I was wrong originally. This airline (Frontier) does have tray tables on some flights. They are at the front of the plane and they cost extra.
So, I'm fine with that. Airlines are entitled to make money. How they do that is up to them.
I wish they would have told me. And I will be avoiding their flights for business travel. But I don't think I'm who they're after so they probably don't care.
Sometimes (not all the time) the mousetrap you already know is the better mousetrap.
I am, at least for this post, talking about actual mousetraps.
I've recently had some run-ins with mice and after trying a couple of newfangled mousetraps I've gone back to the simple, board-and-wire, you-know-it-from-cartoons type mousetrap.
Like so:
The main feature of the new mouse traps seems to be (and you're paying for it): the privilege to not see the mouse you've just killed.
You're paying for it in both price (they cost a lot more: 50 cents or less for the old type vs. $5 for the new type), and you're also paying for it in the efficacy of the trap.
The old board/wire traps kill mice really well and sometimes they kill mice who weren't even looking for food - put them in the right place and it will kill mice.
The newfangled ones require mice to go into the trap, which they can simply decide not to do.
Also, a lot of the new ones are 'use once' traps. You know what else is use once? Something that costs 50 cents.
But, like I said, you have to see a dead mouse.
Just to prove I'm not a total Luddite I did buy some ultrasound blasters that you plug into a wall socket to keep rodents away. I'm waiting to put those up until I see more dead mice though.
Some how, just scaring them off with the ultrasound doesn't prove to me their gone.
Rebuilding software applications is something I've thought a lot about in the last 18 months.
Rebuilds are special and have special considerations.
I wrote a blog about it for work you can read here which talks about some obvious pitfalls.
Here is another thought - what people like about their old system is actually more important than what they don't like.
This may seem obvious but here is the hard part: they are not going to tell you the things that they like. They are going to spend their time telling you what they hate about their current system.
This can happen for a number of reasons. It can happen because complaining is fun. It can happen because it is easy to criticize. And, it can happen because people do not want to be allied with the old regime once the winds of change have begun to blow.
Often, hated features are simply old and would have been corrected by updating the system.
You have to be careful and look hard for what they love, what was great, and what they have to have.
And here is the biggest catch of all. Sometimes people love features that they do not know they love because those features are so well done that they don't even realize that those features are there.
How will you know they love them? How will you be able to recreate or improve upon a feature that is so great that it is barely perceptible?
I've worked with a lot of bar code scanners over the years.
In this era of ubiquitous miniature super-computers (you have on in your pocket or on your desk) you can take advantage of the camera and processing power in those device to do bar code scanning.
You can, and sometimes that's the right choice.
And sometimes, well, sometimes nothing but dedicated hardware will do.
If your project needs a hardware scanner I recommend this little guy:
Jonathan Fries on .
