Jane Bailey

Jane Bailey is a self-published author of urban fantasy novels as well as a part-time blogger; in their day job, they're a renaissance person, dabbling in all sorts of fields in search of interesting puzzles and finding mostly WTFs.

Mar 2018

The Unbidden Password

by in Feature Articles on

English - Mortise Lock with Key - Walters 52173

So here's a thing that keeps me up at night: we get a lot of submissions about programmers who cannot seem to think like users. There's a type of programmer who has never not known how computers worked, whose theory of computers in their mind has been so accurate for so long that they can't look at things in a different way. Many times, they close themselves off from users, insisting that if the user had a problem with using the software, they just don't know how computers work and need to educate themselves. Rather than focus on what would make the software more usable, they program what is easiest for the computer to do, and call it a day.