Jane makes some great points about how software just isn’t the solution to the problem we think it is, in ‘Nobody wants to use any software’, and how software can make everything worse for people. After all “Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, ‘I want some software.’”
I can make the software as usable as possible, but I also need to remember that it’s not in the software where we’ll fix the problems that cause the software to exist in the first place. This little meditation reminds me that we don’t need to overegg what we make with a million features, and it’s our job to dig in to the real problems (feature request lists are one type of computer-related screaming for me), but we can still hold on to the fact that the software, even if it solves a real problem, likely solves a manufactured problem that might have been caused by the existence of some other software or process, all of which is getting in the way of petting a dog or eating 4 mozzarella sticks in a row off the appetizer tray.
I found this article on Eric’s newsletter ‘SC 2.4.4’, go follow it, please.