>> GreenByte.info By Nick Tong (quiksilv) | Supported by: TalkWebSolutions.co.uk

Do developers over complicate things?

Posted At : 15 April 2008 07:21 | Posted By : quiksilv
Related Categories: Technology

This is a great image taken from StuffThatHappens. It raises an interesting question and one that I think I get caught up in - "Do we offer to many features to our end user - because we can?"

Thoughts?

Simplicity


 
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jeff's Gravatar I'm not so sure it's because we "can". Our customers always seem to get hung up on exceptions. They can't see past them, which in turn ends up being the screen on the bottom. In the customers mind it the software must do everything, when 99% of it could be done much simpler.

The second cause is usually the screen on the bottom is an application that's 5 years old and on it's 100th minor revision to get something done for a meeting, show, etc.
# Posted By jeff | 15/04/08 12:45 | Report abusive comment
Brian Kotek's Gravatar Also, the first two apps look like they're doing something far, far different than the last app. Clearly, a data entry screen can't look like the Google search page. While I agree that it can be easy to add unnecessary features, this particular example is pretty ridiculous.
# Posted By Brian Kotek | 15/04/08 17:08 | Report abusive comment
Adrian J. Moreno's Gravatar In my experience, Marketing over-complicates more often than developers.

Years ago I worked for a B2B travel company. We had a home-grown programming language that powered our web application. One code base ran 50,000+ sites. A site's admin user had a toggle for everything under the sun. Marketing called them "nice to haves".

When we dug into the application to start planning a conversion to a J2EE application, three of us indexed the whole admin section. Our DBA Manager then went into the database to see how many options across all of our sites were changed from the default.

Out of around 40,000 options (I kid you not), only about 200 -across all of our sites- were not set to their default values.

The J2EE application started out with about 150 options available to the site admin. Marketing just had to deal with it.
# Posted By Adrian J. Moreno | 15/04/08 19:22 | Report abusive comment
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