Today was a busy day. Well, everyday is busy, but today was very busy.
Went to work at 9:00 and started fixing bugs. Tonight is the dat of RC1 for the flag ship product release. I've been helping on the installation bug fixes for almost a month. Bug fixing is not very exciting, expecially fixing the bugs which is not your program. It was so frustrating to see the poorly-written programs. Imagine that you have to follow the poor design to fix the bugs. It was painful. That's why a good design is so important for the software development. It can make the bug fixing much less painful. Best of all, it won't introduce the large-scale code changes for a bug fix.
Had the Dim-Sum lunch with coworker at Bamboo Garden. Very delicious.
Continued fixing bugs. Why were there so many bugs? (ANGRY) I was supposed to have the soccer game at 5:30PM. But didn't make it util 6:20PM because I had to check in a bunch of codes. And the painful merge process for the installshield uip file took me over 30 minutes. During that time, Crazy A & Crazy G tried to talk with me on YIM. But I had to say "Sorry, I am really busy on the work ...". G is in Hustom right now. Hope the coming hurricane won't affect there :)
Today's soccer game was wonderful. Nine people showed up. And the whether is really cool. Only 65 F. I am not a very good soccer player, but I scored one :) Soccer is a wonderful game and you have to run a lot and burn lots of calories. (People all over the world except US are crazy about this game.)
I had to leave the game early today because I had to attend a wonderful seminar by
BayCHI.
Today is busy mainly because I was late for everything. I was late to check in bug fixes. So I became late for the soccer game. And slow traffic on the highway 101 and close of shoreline exit (due to the 85 construction) lost me. So I was late for the presentation.
However, this seminar was really great. Over 50 people showed up in the conference room of intuit - the TurboTax and Quicken maker.
The following things I found to be very useful for the software UI design. The key in this talk is "Customer Driven".
1) For a new product, a Bare Bones version is enough for the 1.0 release which is a simple version solving user's most important needs.
2) A narrow but deep design, instead of a wide but shallow design
3) A high fidelity flash UI prototype based on which user provides feadbacks helps the detail design successfully.
4) A highly exposed "feadback" button allows user to give suggestions or comments after using the product. The future release will highly focus on the user feadbacks.
(However, there are lots of people saying that feadback doesn't really work as expected. I don't know how intuit is successful on this Rental Property Manager product.)
Work flow: Hand scratch <--> Customer feadback <--> prototype <--> feadback --> Engineers --> product.
High light of the product is easy to use. The focus is the usability.
An interesting quote: Always understand "Who your customer is?" Not "Who is your customer?".
After seminar, it was 9:30PM. Mr. Wang ordered some take-outs. Ate the dinner, took the shower and wrote the blog:
"A BUSY DAY ... " :)
