Dec 19 2007
Everything I Learned, I Learned from Scrooge McDuck
Your correspondent learned his most important business life lesson from Scrooge McDuck at a very young age.
In a scene with a young Scrooge just starting out, our hero struggles to shine enough shoes to make a living. No matter how hard he tries, he just can’t seem to shine enough shoes. Then he gets some advice from a customer that changes his life:
Work smarter, not harder.
Inspired by this advice, Scrooge proceeds to build a machine that allows him to shine several shoes at the same time: he exerts the same effort (it’s bike powered) in the same amount of time, but he reaps 4-5x the revenue per session.
He was well on his way to filling that amazing Money Bin.
This is an important lesson for software design, specifically in the realm of user experience. You can spend hours as a developer creating a really cool, complex feature that you think just rocks. But if the feature doesn’t help the user be more productive, then the user isn’t going to care.
You have just wasted days of developer time that you could have used to fix bugs or do something helpful like build an AJAX-powered foot massager for college linebackers.
What they need
As a project manager at a consulting firm, your correspondent is often torn when developing software for clients between doing what the client asks and what we think the client needs. If we help them develop a better work flow, make it easy to work on that work flow and actually make the user more productive, then the client can actually realize cost savings from the money spent on the software.
You don’t make the user more productive by just working hard, you have to work smart and design smart software the understands the needs of the user, and serves those needs.
You can program the easy, or the beautiful. But if you don’t build what end-users actually need, you just won’t create create great software.
Missing features axiom #5 (with thanks to Scrooge): Work smarter, not harder.