Is it just me...
Is it just me...
... or is producing applications getting harder?
It used to be we could get away with basically implementing what a customer asked for. And yes, a lot of the time they didn't know what they wanted and you had to go round the loop a few times with them. But if it eventually did what they wanted, your job was done. They weren't too concerned with visuals.
Now, things have to look good as well. People's expectations are higher, mainly because of better web design and slick touch based apps. Customers do now - annoyingly - rate your desktop business application much more highly if it has animations and visual transitions and "looks great". And getting visual design "right" is much harder and more expensive. Not only is it not a skill many developers have, but even if you do have some ability in that direction, it's a very subjective criteria. And it's very time consuming. Much more time is spent playing with different visual choices and arrangements. You make things a bit better, you make things a bit worse. Two steps forward, one step back, etc.
I quite enjoy the design side of things, and it's more satisfying to produce an attractive application than an ugly one. But it's making costing and estimating timeframes even harder, I think. Sometimes now I realise I've spent a couple of hours on a simple CRUD form that 10 years ago I would bashed out in 10 minutes.
Anybody else finding the same thing?
... or is producing applications getting harder?
It used to be we could get away with basically implementing what a customer asked for. And yes, a lot of the time they didn't know what they wanted and you had to go round the loop a few times with them. But if it eventually did what they wanted, your job was done. They weren't too concerned with visuals.
Now, things have to look good as well. People's expectations are higher, mainly because of better web design and slick touch based apps. Customers do now - annoyingly - rate your desktop business application much more highly if it has animations and visual transitions and "looks great". And getting visual design "right" is much harder and more expensive. Not only is it not a skill many developers have, but even if you do have some ability in that direction, it's a very subjective criteria. And it's very time consuming. Much more time is spent playing with different visual choices and arrangements. You make things a bit better, you make things a bit worse. Two steps forward, one step back, etc.
I quite enjoy the design side of things, and it's more satisfying to produce an attractive application than an ugly one. But it's making costing and estimating timeframes even harder, I think. Sometimes now I realise I've spent a couple of hours on a simple CRUD form that 10 years ago I would bashed out in 10 minutes.
Anybody else finding the same thing?
Much of this depends on your audience. Have you looked at the screens used by commodities traders lately? Some users are (correctly) more concerned with function than form as long as the form makes it easy to get the job done. These are the people I enjoy working with. The ones who look for "pretty" or "cool" first are of less interest to me. Also, don't forget the significant influence that mobile devices have had on development. The simple fact that the real estate available to design the interface is limited and the "pointing device" is a flabby finger makes a huge difference in the design of an application. Some of this mobile design finds its way onto web pages, giving them the "childish" look that is becoming more common. Lots of forces at work here and yes, building apps now is much more time consuming and costly because of all of these factors and probably a few I have overlooked.
ReplyDeleteWe built a company on creating software for hospitals, and found that a simple crud GUI no longer takes minutes or hours but days. Design planning, testing, validation etc. takes a huge amount of time, but the result is also much better, because the usability and effect of the app is much stronger. Gone are the days where your gui simply replaces a spreadsheet, now it is a regulated tool that conforms to many guidelines and makes a difference to the end user's performance.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, Lars Dybdahl has a strong point, elegance and functionality are not divorced from each other. I'm an independent developer, my customers are among insurance, accountant, human resources and medical business. What drives all their needs, is functionality and demand well polished GUIs that reflect their paperwork. Sometimes the design planning stage takes more time than the programming stage itself.
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