Why User Experience matters the most for a Software

While I have utter regard for individuals who differ from me in terms of personal opinion, some of them do rattle me up. Like it happened one fine morning, when I accessed one of my Social Network’s feed.

“Confession – I dislike Google’s range of assembly line products. Be it Orkut, Buzz, GMail, and the recent Google+. Fellas at Google, why can’t you make something nice?”

The Google fanboy in me didn’t insist on agreeing with my gentleman friend. Since Google is widely renowned for scripting pretty robust algorithms, the mere thought of re-creating some of which shakes up the mightiest of its competitors. For instance

• GMail’s Search feature is beyond comparison.
• Google Earth and Street View are examples of submissive perceptions turning real.
• Android sales have posted an impending threat to Windows monopoly in overall OS segment (or so it seems, unless Microsoft bounces back, which they might with Windows 8).
• My YouTube addiction is simply indescribable.
• Translate has given me oodles of fun with Indian languages.
• Google+ also has its own share of positives like Hangout and Picasa integration.

So when I demanded an explnation from my dear friend over why was he not impressed, he provided a one line stunner – none of the Google tools that he used provided the “love at first sight” experience.

As I curbed my eternal wish to illustrate him about the efforts that go into crafting a fine piece of Software and how Google’s products are mighty competant from other aspects; I went into a tizzy and thought what is it that matters that most to a normal Software user when s/he isn’t aware of what goes behind the curtains?

When a geek like me uses a Software, s/he starts thinking about technical aspects like how it’s back end would be storing data, how are they ensuring scalability despite increasing load, what compression techniques they might be using for transferring data so effectively, the alleged caching mechanisms they would have employed for faster processing, etc. But when a non-geek uses a Software, s/he doesn’t bother about these aspects, s/he simply cares about whether s/he had a blast using the software or not. That’s all.

Something similar happens when we eat food. Most of us do not think about what ingredients might have been used during preparation or the baking techniques employed. We care about the taste and texture more than anything else. That’s the reason we consume more of Potatoes and less of Bitter Gourd, isn’t it?

As eminent critic Raja Sen observed, while watching a movie we hoot for the story rather than other technical aspects, and that indeed is the most important thing for a viewer.

We can apply the same notion to a lot of other stuff like monuments, books, curtains, Twenty 20 Cricket, etc. where we care not about what goes behind, but for what catches the eye.

Bottom line is developers shouldn’t forget that ultimately consumers are king, they need to ensure that users are comfortable using their product , even if it is rock solid from other aspects. Till the time all Software Designers don’t realize it, we’d continue seeing products that had numerous hours of coding efforts directed at them, but they weren’t accepted by the masses simply because the non-geeks didn’t feel at ease getting their hands on them.

Or as my friend pointed it out, they didn’t get struck by “love at first sight”.