Suppose you wanted to find out what needs to be improved in a computer program.....

[nancylebov]

Perhaps I'm especially thinking about computer programs with user interfaces.

There's always introspection by the programmer. What's been annoying you? What do you think might please users? This has limits, partly because the programmer is just one person, and not necessarily much like anyone else, and in particular, may have differences from non-programmers in general. Also, sometimes people get used to annoyances.

I can think of two more approaches. One would be semantic-- looking for complaints (online, in company records, maybe in additional places) and having a program which looks for common themes. Or human beings could do this with their naked minds. I hope at least that much is being done.

Another would be to go over the records from the programs themselves, and see whether there are repetitious patterns (especially if there are errors) from the users. Something like this might already exist. Let me know.

Here's something that I haven't gotten used to. I enter my email address. I can't remember my password. I click on the can't remember your password link. I'm asked to enter my email address again. Why?

Any other approaches to finding out what could use improvement?

Comments

[twistedchick]

The program doesn't know if your email address might have changed from the time when you originally signed up for access to whatever, which could be last week or three years ago? This isn't as rare as you might think.

[nancylebov]

My email address hasn't changed in the minute since I said I forgot my password.

If my email address has changed in the months or years since I used that account, there should be some additional security to verify that I'm me. Password change info should not be sent to a new email address without verification.

In fact, most interfaces that ask for a repeat of the email address won't send the password or a password change link to an email address that doesn't match the username.

[azurelunatic]

I think it's generally that either the programmer was lazy and thought the user should do the work (or didn't think of it as a problem), or the people in charge of budgeting or planning time said "that's too expensive" or "that's not critical enough".

[azurelunatic]

My day job is with the user research department of a user experience wing.

The researcher has a list of common tasks that need to be performed in the programs. She asks the user to perform each task and talk out loud about their thoughts while they're doing it. Meanwhile there is a camera set up that tracks the user's eye movements over the screen, and the mouse movements and other actions on the screen.

Websites look at task abandonment rates, where the user starts the actions that would lead to doing something, and they look at how many of the users got all the way through that. denise said that some of LiveJournal's seemingly random changes back in the day were due to scary task abandonment rates.

Sometimes the researcher watches the user go about their daily tasks, and sees what things the user has problems with on a daily basis, and how they actually use the software.

Sometimes the researcher gets together a bunch of users and poses some topics, and the users have a great time bouncing stuff off each other and going off on some really inspired rants. (I get to transcribe some of these sessions. It's always amazing what they say.)

[siderea]

There's always "asking nicely", which can be as informal as having a "report bugs to" email address in the About dialog or soliciting feedback on the product's blog, or as structured as a beta test ("you can use this software early if you promise to tell me what's wrong with it") or a focus group ("I will pay you money to tell me what's wrong with my software.")

Often the users, at least some of them, have quite a lot to contribute if permitted.