Daniel Hardy

One of the biggest problems facing those who develop the User Experience is when you should listen to your customers and when you should innovate.  Henry Ford famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”  This statement has been a banner for many in the User Experience realm for why you don’t have to talk to customers to make great products.

But there are other times when you should really sit down and listen to what your customers are telling you.  Recently someone decided to take the time to create an entire website dedicated to identifying problems with a product they USE. Dear Adobe collects peoples grips about any and all adobe products then lets other people vote for how important the problems is to them.

After skimming through the top 50 items you can see that Adobe’s Update process for Acrobat is a sore spot for a lot of people.  If Adobe is smart they would try and react swiftly to this by LISTENING to what the users are saying and resoliving their problems.  Sure not everything in the list can be corrected(pricing) but a lot of the ideas are common sense items that Adobe has lost site of.

So as many of you know I have sold my soul to devil and finally broke down and bought an iPhone.  Over the last month or so I have found it to be a great tool but one that is definitely flawed.

One of the flaws that has been plaguing me is a missing artist on my play list.  This sounds stupid but I thought I was loosing my mind because I could swear that it was there and that I have heard it play when I was using it as background music.  I finally have conclusive proof that it is there and in fact, there is an odd bug that plagues the iPhone.

Basically I can look the song up by its name but when trying to find it by artist there is no listing.  The really odd part is that for this given artist (Pepper) it occurs on my wife’s iPhone as well.

Is Apple trying to boycott this particular artists? (joking)

Jeff Atwood recently wrote a great article about how he gave a small open source project $5000 with no strings attached.  To his surprise 4 months later the money hadn’t been touched.  To me this is a great example of how open source is often about the love and not about the money.

The comments section was of course filled with numerous suggestions of how the developers should have spent the money.  One theme that stood out to me was to spend the money on hiring a graphic designer to come in and update the look of their site or perhaps a marketing firm to help them get the word out.

This really resonated with me as I have been contemplating why so few designers donate their time and energy to free products.  It is intriguing that so many great developers are willing to give up their free time to create amazing products while there appears to be a dramatic shortage of designers, marketers, technical writing, and other “support”(for lack of better term) personnel willing to donate their time.

Is it because only developers are using the products?  This certainly isn’t the case considering some of the greatest applications out there are open source.  Perhaps instead it is because the products these professionals are currently using are not opens source.

Perhaps more important than dwelling on why there is a shortage we should be looking for a solution.  I have on many occasions made comments to friends and colleagues about perhaps supporting an open source product by creating a comp, or giving them usability advice.

With that in mind I am guilty of not contributing as much as I should.  Most of my digital exsitence is now dependent on open source products and as of late I have not been contributing.