A ramble about various note-taking applications

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jun 21, 2023 at 08:11 AM

Hm. This is an interesting question, and I’ve mused on it for many years. I think the answer is actually quite simple. You’re using software that’s genuinely useful to you every day, for large parts of the day. That means it has to be enjoyable to use. Not just functional, not just “efficient”, but actively enjoyable. This means a couple for things:

a) it needs to do what it does in straightforward, uncomplicated ways that are easy to fathom and quick to turn into user habits
b) it needs to look nice, so you smile when you open it and keep smiling as you come back to it – over and over again.

I think “form over function, function over form” is a false dichotomy. Form is a part of function – if form makes the software user-friendlier, then it’s fulfilling a vital function. I suspect many of us have had to use – some of us no doubt still have to use – corporate software that is clearly the result of some function-focused programmer’s high-speed and rather disinterested efforts to “fill the brief” without attempting to make the software user-friendly. And we’ve all experienced the nightmares that result.

Software that looks good while also doing what it’s supposed to do efficiently does much more than just “fill a brief” – it makes users actively want to use it, which is (from a corporate viewpoint, too) highly desirable! All companies depend on users following proper processes. One of the reasons users start to smuggle their own preferred software into offices or onto their work machines, leading to entire subcultures that are essentially unobserved/unmonitored by IT, is because they don’t enjoy using the in-house software they’re supposed to be using. It’s confusing, doesn’t have the functions they want (or does, but goes about performing them in all sorts of arcane ways), and it looks horrible – instantly depressing. So they rush away and find nice, friendly software instead – and do things fast and furiously with it, in ways the corporate software doesn’t really allow, let alone encourage.

A classic example, for me, of software that’s not fully realised the importance of genuine user-friendliness (or rather, user happiness, which is why savvy programmers now speak about UX rather than just UI), is computer-assisted translation (CAT) software, which continues to follow the kind of blocky, 1980s grid-based approach that is now found almost nowhere else. How translators put up with it I really don’t know – except that all the major players in the market have followed the same approach. I remember discussing this with one of them (MemoQ’s very amiable programming director): he was genuinely unable to see my point, which I found rather fascinating in itself. And yet it could have enabled him to drastically differentiate his software from his main competitors’.

Paul Korm wrote:
I’m always curious why the appearance of software is enough to almost
>instantly repel, before probing the depths to see the possible fitness
>of that software to serve one’s needs.