Sometimes when we’re building our web based applications, doing things by design is often, in a way – limiting. Think about it – it’s just 1 person’s perspective, or 2 in our case, before it finds it’s way into a programmer’s hands. It’s almost impossible that we’ve thought of every possible scenario. Here’s an example from earlier:

To put it into context, this is about a Facebook style news feed on the home screen of our latest piece of software, AddBook.

Sabrina: “Should it show reminders on the news feed?”

Ads: “…………(thinking)…… Yeah”

Sabrina: “Good, because Antoine messed it up and put it there”

I hadn’t considered the idea of putting reminders in the news feed, neither had Sabrina, but someone else just assumed that it should be like that. It’s not always swirly whirly ice cream… Sometimes developers do things their way and it’s not as good.

The thing to think about when making decisions about features in software is:

“What are the customers going to think of that?”