Much has been said on this topic, by smarter people than me. I won’t attempt an educated version of the topic (as I’m not actually educated in that subject area other than by experience), I have nothing backing this rant other than an ability to empathise with end users and a burning need to Make Things Better.
No-one actually enjoys the daily grind of their job, all the piddly little repetitive actions they must complete in between the bits that keep them turning up to work each day. As a so-called systems developer, I’m in the lucky position to be able to smooth out process-wrinkles, replacing tedious manual tasks with things that the Computer can do for them. A large part of what I do is listen to users complain about their job and the tools they have to do it with. I sort the complaints out into Things I Can Help With, and Personality Issues.
I genuinely care about the user who has to wait 37 seconds for a badly-designed screen to load – I can *feel* how annoying and unproductive that is for the user. I can *understand* how much happier they would be doing their dull repetitive job if they didn’t have that extra annoyance to contend with. So I fix it.
I’m not, and never will be, a fantastic programmer. I don’t actually *want* to be, truth be told. It’s a job I’ve blundered into and feel a constant fraud as I know *genuinely* fantastic programmers. I’m too squeamish to be a doctor or similar – there are certain words I can’t even *hear*, never mind look at. So I play doctor to computer systems. That involves a certain amount of basic programming, and while I’ll never be a luminary, I get by.
I find it difficult to harden my heart against users when they complain about something that ought to be fixable. My view of IT is that we provide the means for other people to do their jobs, and where there are problems, we are the wizards that make the problems go away. We don’t provide direct financial benefits to the company – we don’t sell things and make money. Our worth lies in our ability to make the rest of the business more profitable, and part of that is keeping users happy.
Common sense, and several surveys, have shown that happy users are more productive. I’m generally happier when my computer doesn’t crash several times a day. Even if the problem is more low-grade than that e.g. an application freezing a few times a day and having to be restarted, it still has an impact on how a user feels about doing their job. Yes, it’s easy to restart an application, or reboot the computer, or remember that the printer can only print one copy of a document so you need to click print as many times as you want documents. Individually incidents like these are small and the symptoms are easily treated, but while the underlying cause isn’t addressed, the user feels like they are never going to get better.
I appreciate that IT problems are complicated and may involve a fair amount of trial and error to resolve them, and it may be that the solution to one problem is the cause of another. But that’s why they pay us more than the man who puts the paper in the photocopier – we are paid for our knowledge and experience at solving these problems. Otherwise, it could just as well be an office junior answering the phone and saying ‘just log off and log back on again’. Same result, but much cheaper.
At the end of the day, the IT infrastructure exists to allow the users to make money for the business. Therefore if user experience doesn’t matter to you, you shouldn’t work in IT. Go do something else instead and content yourself with reading BOFH.
Obligatory comment on X-UA-Compatible
This strikes me as a continuation of those ‘Best viewed in $browsername $version’ badges, that irritate me beyond all measure.
I will use what version and what browser I choose, to consume your content. If I choose to have the text chiselled out onto the back of a passing badger, that is *my* choice.
At the moment I’m suffering my way through an enormous web application, targetted at IE7 only (as it’s an intranet application and we are currently using IE7), but I would not dream of testing only in IE7, as I realise that time progresses (shocking, I know), and as IE crawls more and more towards standards compliance, I’m hoping that one day the playing field will be level enough for me not to have to test in n+1 browsers. Things looked fine in IE7 that looked skewiff in Safari3, which told me I’d got something wrong. I don’t want to be lied to by a browser, so being tied to IE7 forever sounds like my idea of hell.
It wouldn’t be quite so bad if IE8 went for ‘latest-version’ by default. That way, things can progress naturally. I *can* see the appeal of being able to specify IE7 mode if you have to (if you’ve hacked together something terrible in a hurry and can’t fix it before they rush out IE8 asap) to buy you a little more breathing time if it looks like trolls toenails in IE8. But we don’t want to get stuck in 2006, do we?
What saddens me most is the fact that it seems to be tearing the webdev community apart. There are some quite personal attacks going on and it’s sad to see WaSP eating itself. I’m sure it will sort itself out, we’re all adults.
I think the real problem is not necessarily the browser developers, it’s the web developers themselves. WaSP and co. are more or less a tiny minority of idealists (I’m not knocking idealism, I suffer terribly myself). Most web developers are cowboys. Yes, sweeping generalisation, but if you look at the majority of sites you get a good idea of the level of standards-awareness that there is out there. And yet, that’s not necessarily the fault of the developers either. I was consulted on a web project and mentioned accessibility. I got the response of ‘but who enforces that, do we have to do it?’ from the person commissioning the site. With attitudes like that, there is no real incentive to push for standards compliance in projects. It’s always quicker to cut corners and knock something together that displays and behaves okay in IE6 and doesn’t suck too much in IE7. Gets the job done, doesn’t it?
Have depressed myself with that, I always find it delightful to discover that some people *do* actually care about doing things properly and cleanly. I evangelise about nice clean code, use of CSS, maintainability, accessibility and basic sanity, but sometimes I feel like Scary Bag-lady haranguing passers-by.
What the web standards community *really* needs to do is to reach out a bit more, beyond the elite crowd, to the bums-on-seats level of web developer. Enthuse and fire these people with your message, get corporate penetration with the benefits of standards compliance – make it a *standard* approach to web development.
Only then, can we win the browser war.