Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Do Software Companies Really Care for Users of Their Software?

I am being very careful about this post. It is definitely not an outburst of a bad day at work or bad experience with a software (e.g. Word Processor) I use .

Whatever you are told by the executives of a (software) company, it should be taken with a grain of salt. All companies have to make money.

But the user of their software has to be at the center of their strategy, i.e. their day-today operations. It is obviously required that companies come up with interesting schemes and support the user in a paid manner, but the (hapless) user has to be at the center of all of that.

It is not easy, however. You need to have empathy and practical intelligence, both. This combination is very rare. Usability of software is its number one quality and anything done to improve that should be done all the time. Usability, interestingly, rarely challenges the stability of the software.