Software developers at my company are, naturally, grouped into teams that tackle (or “own”) respective portions of the platform we produce. I’m on the client team which means we are responsible for most of the applications that users use to interface with the system. I say most because some specific server-focused teams still develop and maintain their own client interfaces for administrators (even though we own the overall “admin” client application).

Anyway, I was recently promoted to a Team Lead in the client team (which is sort of a sub-team lead, actually), with my responsibilities being over the applications that are “user”-centric (bad description, I realize). A better way to put it is the applications that end-users will use to interact with our system, as opposed to administrative applications, web-based applications (whether user or admin focused), or third-party development APIs.

In our first team meeting we discussed several things, but I brought up two items specifically. The first was a quote from Joel Spolsky’s online (and print) book User Interface Design for Programmers. He says:

“A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.”

This is especially relevant to my team since our goal is not a “flashy” or “pretty” application (even though we desire both of them, and they both have their place). We will ultimately be successful when our applications behave exactly like the user thinks it should and the little annoyances they experience every second from using our applications are removed.

The second thing I brought up was a principle I learned from several years ago when I used to participate in the photoshop contests at Worth 1000. I don’t remember where I read it on the web site, but some advice offered by a more advanced “chopper” to wannabes included a final reminder that the difference between a good submission and a great submission—between 3rd place and 1st place—is the extra five percent effort put in at the end. Often one does a good job on something and then whether due to the fatigue from working hard, complacency born from over-familiarity with the project, or some other unnamed factor, the end result is “good enough” and submitted. It’s true that a good job was indeed done—something very functional was created, for example—but with 5% more effort it could go from good to great. And I don’t necessarily mean great in that flashy, pretty, Mac kind of great, but great in that it’s-so-usable-I-don’t-even-know-I’m-using-it sense.

I think a really good example of this principle was highlighted in a post by Jan Miksovsky where he writes about a well thought through, and extremely subtle feature of Microsoft Outlook.

I’m going to be keeping my eyes open for work done on the web or the desktop that exhibit “the extra five percent” and look at what was done and how it was done. Maybe if I find something interesting I’ll post it here… otherwise it’s back to tech posts for me!