You’re absolutely right about the tool-use focus that most companies have. Just think about it whenever seeing an ad for a new product or new release of a product. How often do we see “Manage your email more easily” or “Get your job done faster” as release notes? We always see “Added one-click deletion of all spam” and “20% speed improvement of nightly arcane batch process X.”

Very well put, Scott! :)

I just added that to my database of quotes about software design. I recommend anyone involved in defining software products (or any products for that matter) to stop and think about it. Most high tech companies focus on user-tool-use aka product-feature-list way too much.

- Michael
http://michael.hightechproductmanagement.com

I’m a bit of a gadget nut myself, so I also prefer the ability to set aperture size and save to raw or tif. I have the same approach with software, I love the autofilter, pivot tables, conditional formatting and array-formulas of excel – use them all the time.

Alan Cooper makes a great point in The Inmates are Running the Asylum, that people like us are homo-logicus, and our approach to the world is very different than most people – who just want to get the job done. Perhaps I overcompensate a little, because I know my predisposition, but I try and stress the user-task focus over the user-tool-use focus as much as possible.

I think we also draw the line differently when we’re talking about twenty users versus twenty million.

It’s great to know that even the SLR from Canon has dual-controls – and that’s a common approach in software too, making common tasks easy and infrequent tasks reasonable.

Thanks again, and keep reading and commenting!

To get back to your original point about software design, I agree that things need to be designed with the users’ tasks in mind — when I design custom BPM systems for my customers, that’s exactly how I’m focussed. That being said, however, I think that a camera is more like Microsoft Excel than a custom, task-specific piece of software: how many people use even 10% of Excel’s funtionality? How many use formulas, or VBA, or even value-specific formatting? These things are the f-stops of Excel that only those who really want that sort of control learn to use; most people use what’s in front of them, or do a few more complex things with wizards (the software equivalent of Canon’s preset modes). Excel, like an SLR camera, is a generalist tool, not a specialist tool; a huge set of features, most of which are never used by the average user, is an expected result.