The true nature of things

By some reason it seems as if my creativity always peeks when I’m on sick leave. It doesn’t seem totally unheard of thou,  cases that come to mind are Henrik Kniberg and he’s claim that he wrote Scrum and XP from the Trenches under the same circumstances, and some other guy who created a children’s game during one week of sick leave.

I have not done anything that measures up to the just mentioned feats. However I’ve tried a new approach to handle “technical itches”; addressing them right away, as fast as possible. The kind of technical issues that I’m talking about are of the same nature as those in my old idea “What technology could have but did not do for me today“.

Technical itch example: The tediousness of rating a movie online

I had just seen “Back to the Future Part III” and I wanted to give it three out of five stars on filmtipset.se (Sweden’s largest movie community). In order to do that I had to:

• Surf to filmtipset.se
• Log in, if no cookies present
• Search for “Back to the Future Part III”
• Click on the right on in the search results
• Click the little image that says “3″

I did not like this, so I tried to make it better right away, I ended up with the following steps

• Press [Shift]+[Space], to invoke Ubiquity
• Write “fi” (interpreted as filmtipset-rate) followed by “Back to the Future Part III 3″

A lot easier, isn’t it? I think that trivial tasks like this one should be so easy and simple that you shouldn’t need to think about them, nor lose focus from whatever else you are currently doing. An other example that can be found in this chaotic log, is checking your account balance, I can not see why such a trivial task should be more than a few keystrokes away.

The itches I’ve addressed so far have all been solved using fast prototyping, thus they are not very portable, when they are I will make them public.

Usability sure has a long way to go…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 6:52 pm and is filed under What technology could have but did not do for me today, coding, usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.