Things end users care about but programmers don't

I know where this ends; been there done that. The programmer implements all those options in a configuration panel, the user looks at it saying &quot;uh... too complicated&quot; (0), shuts down and uninstall the software then chooses an easier one that forces mostly predefined options on a dumbed down panel, only to complain later that it can&#x27;t do this and that therefore a more powerful one is needed. Rinse, repeat:^)<p>Also, if anyone is using a RAD for developing the software for a customer, never, ever, ever, show the customer that a button or any other widget can be easily shown or not, moved, resized etc. on the panel, or be prepared to be asked a layout change like twice a day, of course for free since it&#x27;s just 5 seconds of clicking. Seriously, sometimes it&#x27;s much better for users to believe that the UI is some sort of black magic that cannot be touched otherwise they&#x27;ll waste all your time rearranging the layout instead of concentrating on more important issues they&#x27;re not aware of.<p>(0) Some good research has been done in the past about how much information the user can be shown before the amount of it ends up distracting from the problem; iirc probably IBM was involved; I was told about that in the mid-end 90s but it likely dates from the previous decade.

This article is a good reminder. When I started out my programming career many years ago, these things were fundamental in the way I created software, however things seem to have gone downhill in recent years.<p>The reason? The pressure in the past from co-founders or stakeholders to &#x27;get things out the door quickly&#x27; and to get a quick and dirty MVP out there. This often meant lack of time to consider these small details (or even to backload them into the system later for v1.0).<p>Also ironically, we&#x27;ve had professional UX and CX designers work on my software creations who have cut a lot of these things off the interface and functionality as &#x27;unnecessary cruft&#x27;.<p>I would also add to the list under Colours&#x2F;Formatting, that a lot of &#x27;dark mode&#x27; designs out there that are considered fashionable just have too low a colour contrast or too small a font to make it readable my someone like me with degrading eyesight.

A lot of those are nice additions, maybe in the third or fourth generation of the application when you got the data structure nailed down you can look at skinning and things. Other bits sound nice but are back-end hell or licensing hell to implement.<p>I try to get the program being able to be useful informative, easy for data entry, etc. After that - if I get the time - I can go onto enhancing other features like the style sheet (now that you got a good idea of what styles it utilizes its much easier to optimise the CSS to make it skin-able.)<p>Integrations and import&#x2F;export is a pretty nebulous thing, and if you are interacting with some proprietary system you are always needing to maintain the export&#x2F;import code to stay compatible (not that easy). Depending on the format you may run into licensing issues to get interoperability, in others some of the local dev or external use tech might not be mature enough to implement well or correctly.<p>&quot;Just put an undo on it.&quot; &quot;Detailed and up to date guides in text with screenshots at each step and highlights&quot;<p>Yeah. <i>sigh</i> If the development and team is mature these things will eventually happen. But then comanies fall back when they are riding high on just maintenance and loose the experienced members; then new devs that come in are so overwhelmed on the legacy codebase they just re-write from scratch, picking some bits to reimplement, and loosing a lot of others.<p>Then again,<p>you put a knowledgeable developer in to the planning process and they would surprise you &quot;We could reorder this entry process here and cut more than half the time on data entry&quot;, &quot;That report on the old system is redundant, here&#x27;s why&quot; and &quot;have you ever thought of doing this cool feature? Because that would be so easy implement...&quot;

I&#x27;m quite sad that accessibility is not mentioned at all, because I&#x27;d say it is THE CLASSIC feature that many users pine for but developers frequently overlook.<p>Just to name a few of the major ones:<p>* Screen-Reader Support<p>* Alt-text for images<p>* Sensible zoom behaviour<p>* Options for keyboard input (instead of relying on mouse)<p>* Colour-blind &amp; high-vis color schemes (Though &quot;change color of things&quot; covers that, at least)<p>Funny side-effect is that implementing this stuff very often (I&#x27;d even say almost always) makes the product better for your non-disabled&#x2F;non-handicapped customers as well.

Also known as &quot;Things end users care but not enough to pay anyone to work on it, rather than on your application&#x27;s core domain. Which they are not exactly willing to pay for either, but that&#x27;s a different story.&quot;

&gt; Use accounts&#x2F;permissions from Active Directory<p>If users want that, they tend to be enterprise customers, and you can charge money for your software. That&#x27;s good for the programmer :-)<p>Users who want AD integration also want (generalizing a bit, of course):<p>* Audit logs<p>* Metrics export to common BI tools<p>* APIs<p>* Separate billing address<p>* Role-based access control<p>* a way to sync data between different environments<p>... and so on. It&#x27;s amazing how much work you as a programmer could spend &quot;enterprisifying&quot; a simple application.<p>I kinda wish for better tooling to make enterprise-ready applications, so that many of these things are less effort.

<p><pre><code> Number&#x2F;date formatting to the right locale </code></pre> Uh,... maybe. This may work well for most people, but at least allow me the option of setting up my own format. I happen to live in a locale where the &quot;official&quot; locale-specific formats for numbers and money are almost never used by real people (because they&#x27;re ugly and fuggly.) So it gets pretty annoying when LibreOffice <i>only</i> recognises it&#x27;s own list of locales and will <i>only</i> apply the &quot;official&quot; formats. As a result, you can count on the fingers of one head the number of people here who will use &quot;Format &gt; Money&quot;. They&#x27;ll rather use some number format that looks the way locals all expect things to look.

Umm, I want a pony too?<p>I mean, I think most programmers care about these things and want them too, but people (programmers <i>and</i> end users, but especially end users) tend to drastically underestimate how much they actually cost.<p>I&#x27;ve contracted for a small dev contracting shop, and it&#x27;s amazing how, when customers come with a long wishlist of things they want a piece of software to do, these customers quickly &quot;stop caring&quot; about most of these features when they see actual dollar amounts next to each line item.

Surprising how much of it is about color. As a user, I don&#x27;t really care what color anything is, even if it&#x27;s nasty like Discord. I want a dark theme, but it&#x27;s mostly because it lets me save battery and doesn&#x27;t glow in my bed at night.

Honestly this article misses my main request as a user:<p>1. Software should be free of bugs. At the very least, updates should not introduce new bugs.<p>2. Software shouldn&#x27;t phone home. Ever. If I want to submit a bug report I will submit one through the usual OS channels, and I will give my feedback through your feedback button.<p>3. If you are a web service don&#x27;t ever popup banners&#x2F;tips&#x2F;chat windows&#x2F;whatever. Put links to them and I will click on them if I want. If you pop up a modal asking for my e-mail address I am leaving immediately.<p>4. Assuming you are doing well on #1, you shouldn&#x27;t need to release updates on an hourly cadence. If there is a security vulnerability release a fix ASAP, but for new features bundle them together and release annually for mature software or quarterly&#x2F;semiannually for software that is still being finished.<p>I mean having a color scheme that is pleasant to look at is nice, but I would rather you just use my system settings in the first place. What I care about is stability and that the software puts my interests, as a user, first.

Users don&#x27;t care about most of this. Custom colors? Tell that to Apple&#x27;s customers who seems to have no problem using a non-customizable OS. Running on obscure hardware configurations? Users don&#x27;t have those, programmers do. Company branding? That&#x27;s not a user request. Touch gestures? Who made this up? Not users.

- Some words or identifiers should always have a specific color<p>- The same thing should have the same color everywhere<p>- Good contrast<p>is at odds with:<p>- WYSIWYG editor that behaves like Word<p>If you give users the option to use all bold Comic Sans, someone will do just that - and other users they share their work with will have to bear the brunt of reading it. Silly example, but it goes to show that you really can&#x27;t have it all. For every user that cares about one of these things, there&#x27;s 9 others for whom having to read, understand and decide not to care about it makes the program more complicated than it needs to be.

You mean &quot;Things end users care about but can&#x27;t afford&quot;?

It&#x27;s not that programmers don&#x27;t care about this. It&#x27;s simply that with today&#x27;s tools this is $1E7 to 1E8 to implement all of these decently for any application.

Early Windows (probably up to and including XP) did a lot of these things right. But now Microsoft is starting to go against their own recommendations.

These are mostly things that programmers <i>who are also end users</i> care about. I haven&#x27;t run into a single non-technical user who cares about customizable colors, dark mode, exporting to CSV&#x2F;JSON&#x2F;whatever else, customizable shortcuts etc.<p>The average user won&#x27;t even know what most of this list means.

Color is huge! There are so many half-baked trends in color that look great for people on large screens with wide color gamut and young eyes, that in less than ideal conditions are completely illegible.<p>Some of the best guidance for the use of color written in plain, easy to understand language: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;designsystem.digital.gov&#x2F;design-tokens&#x2F;color&#x2F;overview&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;designsystem.digital.gov&#x2F;design-tokens&#x2F;color&#x2F;overvie...</a><p>Should be mandatory reading for anyone with any hand in designing a user interface.

Do users really care about being able to customize the design (themes or more fine grained)?<p>I did that when I had my first Amiga. For a while, when I bought a new Computer, I configured Windows back to &quot;classic mode&quot;.<p>After the umpteenth time, it just gets tiring. These days I don&#x27;t even change the desktop background anymore.<p>I&#x27;d much rather the developer make sensible choice to begin with, so that I don&#x27;t have to think about it.<p>Maybe I should look into Vagrant. Even installing extra &quot;developer fonts&quot; on every computer I might develop with is too straining to me.

I&#x27;d agree with only some of the suggestions.<p>&gt; <i>[all things color scheme]</i><p>A decent color scheme is enough. People don&#x27;t change it much, if at all, unless they&#x27;re bored, so I wouldn&#x27;t go out of my way to support it. Main use cases are, arguably, light and dark mode, and supporting an OS-global switch if one exists. Tips about assigning colors to things are spot-on, though; consistency and discernibility turns color into a powerful communication tool.<p>&gt; <i>WYSIWYG editor that behaves like Word</i><p>Yes please. In some ways, I&#x27;m sad that ActiveX&#x2F;whatever the way to embed Word on your webpage was died. People really shouldn&#x27;t keep reinventing their own WYSIWYGs on pages, each with slightly different behavior or interface. That said, this would probably be handled best by a set of guidelines or a library from Microsoft, instead of having to connect to actual Word.<p>&gt; <i>Number&#x2F;date formatting to the right locale</i><p>In my personal opinion, locales should die, and everyone should switch to dot as decimal separator and ISO-8601, respectively. But I&#x27;m fully aware the general consensus seem to be different :&#x2F;.<p>&gt; <i>Tell me what this does before I click on it</i><p>That&#x27;s what tooltips are for. Harder on mobile, but there&#x27;s no excuse for web developers who don&#x27;t include them.<p>&gt; <i>Support touch gestures and mouse</i><p>Support touch gestures <i>and</i> mouse <i>and</i> a stylus, simultaneously, as separate things. Because they are separate. A pen&#x2F;stylus on a 2-in-one computer (e.g. Microsoft Surface or Dell Latitude lines) is a huge productivity booster <i>if it&#x27;s supported</i>. It rarely is. I&#x27;m constantly hunting for software that does it right, but there&#x27;s very little of it, and I have not yet seen a single web application capable of handling a stylus (even though technically, the APIs for that are there).<p>Examples of correctly handling a pen vs. other modalities: without having to switch modes or active tools, allow me to draw with a pen, select with one finger, pan with two fingers, and select with a mouse.<p>&gt; <i>UX</i><p>The entire section is spot-on.

All of these things can be had in the software you want - just need to ask for it up front and pay a sufficient amount of money and accept a longer timeline. Some of these things are surprisingly expensive, even when they seem simple. It is entirely plausible that, after discussing prices, the response from client is &#x27;actually... can you just make me a CLI thingy that spits out a csv?&#x27;

Have you seen the settings of the current version of YouTube? First of all, it took me a good ten minutes to find them, because now I have to scroll down on the Account screen to reach it, and there is no indication that this screen is scrollable.[1] No scrollbar visible until you start scrolling. Nothing peering up from the bottom end. No drop-shadow at the bottom. It just looks like the the last option on the page is Turn on Incognito.<p>Once I reach the settings menu, it took me a while to figure out what I could click on and what I couldn&#x27;t. The buttons are not buttons, they&#x27;re just text. In fact, everything is text[2], only the context (&quot;Live chat&quot; vs &quot;YouTube, a Google Company&quot;) suggests that something is clickable.<p>Why?<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;andai.tv&#x2F;img&#x2F;youtube.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;andai.tv&#x2F;img&#x2F;youtube.png</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;andai.tv&#x2F;img&#x2F;youtube2.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;andai.tv&#x2F;img&#x2F;youtube2.png</a>

I still see retail sites crippled by poor search choices, such as requiring the customer to understand how the retailer categorizes its inventory before it will search for anything, or by showing the union of the matches to each term, so that adding terms, in an attempt to narrow the search, broadens it instead.

This reads like a list of decent but non critical enhancements to many programs. The funny thing is, myself and most programmers I know <i>love</i> working on things like this but most of the time it is not the programmer who is calling the shots on what his time should be spent on.<p>It&#x27;s the customer who doesn&#x27;t want to spend money or the product owner who needs to be mindful of the budget spend.<p>So a better title would be: &#x27;things end users would really enjoy but don&#x27;t actually feel is worth spending money on&#x27;. Because if those users would actually think these are valuable things, they would pay for them and you bet that programmers will implement them. They are also users and fairly nitpicky ones.

&gt; Can be mounted on a path that is not the root of the domain.<p>This is so important to me when deploying frameworks and whatnot; I don&#x27;t want to ever spend an hour battling nginx or httpd to move it into a fake directory.

UX is tough. So tough it has it&#x27;s own speciality field. Programmers are not UX&#x27;ers. That&#x27;s fine. We can&#x27;t be accountable for everything. We would however benefit from a better sense of empathy for users, as well as a more holistic view of &quot;the product.&quot;<p>The medium (code) should align with the message (experience).<p>Long to short, not a single user wake up and think &quot;Today I want to use a product based on Technology X, Y and&#x2F;or Z.&quot;

Isn&#x27;t that what pay is for? If you care about something but your programmer doesn&#x27;t, then you pay them to start caring about it?

This is a great list and I want to add that the “simple” ones are a lot harder when third party integrations are involved. Or even dependencies on other teams in a sufficiently large org. It takes a certain mentality and commitment to look beyond “programming” problems to address these scope&#x2F;not-my-job issues.

This is the true one:<p>* WYSIWYG editor that behaves like Word

&gt; Case-sensitive&#x2F;insensitive filtering.<p>YES.<p>Searching for &quot;O&#x27;Brien&quot; and coming up with no hits because it&#x27;s in there as &quot;O&#x27;brien&quot; is a slap in the face. It&#x27;s a clear signal that the programmer believes the user should serve the computer instead of the other way around.<p>Lookin&#x27; at you, Linux filesystems...

It depends a lot on a type of app, business users usually don&#x27;t care much about color palettes and having a dark themes available, and worry much more about how streamlined is the workflow for their particular needs.<p>&gt; but our tools make it really hard to provide<p>That&#x27;s why we build web apps nowadays...

Didn&#x27;t OS&#x2F;2 bake a bunch of those things into the operating system where they belong? Why don&#x27;t we use it? Multiple &quot;Product of the year&quot; awards (I&#x27;ve seen 4 in a row but cannot confirm). I&#x27;m still a fan.

Another title is &quot;Things users will struggle through, because your product fixes a critical, fundamental issue for them&quot;<p>No snark intended. Often a product that solves a real huge pain point has it&#x27;s own sharp-ish edges too.

Spelling my surname properly. Computers can&#x27;t do it. They just say &quot;oh, let&#x27;s capitalise the first letter and make the rest small&quot;. Makes me sad.

Speak for yourself. This reads like an enumeration of the traits of a stereotypical arrogant &#x27;programmer&#x27; from the 90s.<p>(Got my start in the 90s but didn&#x27;t stay there)

From 1st hand experience let me add<p>IT:<p>Your app can magically talk to servers on the internet from behind my Firewall without my IT being capable to whitelist respective servers.

How are multiple export formats, configurable deployments&#x2F;platforms, and consistent UX things programmers don&#x27;t care about?

Yes, sometimes when you use new updated ... these things go missing in other places so it becomes painful to retrain to the next version.

This title is awful. Plenty of programmers care. It just takes a lot of work to get a project to this level of done.

... and also things they don&#x27;t want to pay for.

This list looks more like what programmers care about as end users.<p>Average users prefer WhatsApp and Instagram over good messengers. I honestly don&#x27;t know why such bad software is still relevant.

if programmer.have_time() and programmer.very_well_paid(): implement_things_users_care_about()

End users don’t care that you want to refresh your design every year.<p>I know you need to keep your designers employed and doing work but please stop.

I&#x27;m sick of the meme that programmers aren&#x27;t end users too. I use software as much as any non-programmer does.

&gt; Good contrast<p>&gt; Automatic contrast of text if I pick a dark&#x2F;light background<p>These are not preferences, these are minimum requirements. Programmers should care about this.

Here’s something users <i>don’t</i> care about. Your next version. You’re a fucking text editor. You do not get to update, ever. Not “remind me later,” not “skip this version,” never. How <i>fucking dare you</i> throw an update prompt or a release notes screen when I’m trying to use a tool to do a job. It’s unconscionable arrogance to think a change to an already-complete piece of software is worth an interruption like that.<p>If I want it to behave differently than it does, I’ll go looking, and the answer is “you gotta upgrade” then I will. But not a moment before.

As a dev I care about many of those things and feel like a voice in the wilderness.<p>So far as weird numerics are concerned, it&#x27;s astonishing how complacent the microcomputer world is about that.<p>I think that 0.1+0.2 = 0.3000000000000004 or whatever it is is a distraction from &quot;it just works&quot; and if we want to offer more functionality to the &quot;non-professional programmer&quot; we should do something about it.<p>Mainframes have had decimal numeric types from the very beginning since the people involved realized that fuzzy math meant you cut checks for the wrong amount. In the micro world there was the time that Apple had an Integer basic which schools thought wasn&#x27;t good enough, so they licensed a basic with (bad) floating point from Microsoft.<p>The people who care about numerics tend to be people who care about performance, those people can deal with the weirdness but they don&#x27;t want to give up any performance for it at all.

&gt; It should work on my old android phone browser&#x2F;IE 11<p>Disrespectfully, No. Please die, IE. Please.<p>But otherwise, I think the spirit of this is pretty accurate, if only that parenthetical at the top were perhaps more emphasized or explained.<p>Anecdotally, working for crm-adjacent services, there was just a firehose of things customers (and our own sales&#x2F;customer-facing teams) wanted to implement for the sake of &quot;customization.&quot; And especially some of the customer asks were incredibly QoL-based and reasonable (shocking, I know), but the reality was that the roadmap was being pushed ever along, management and sales want new features to polish up for leads and investors, and we simply lacked the manpower to sufficiently cover both sides of that coin. Now that speaks more to failures in the org structure and leadership than anything (imo), but I think it&#x27;s not dissimilar at many places, both small and large.<p>Long edit complete.