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Observe Then Do.

Do you know what "Top 5 Most-Used Commands in Microsoft Word 2003"? Eh... Nevermind. Why would anyone bothers, unless you are a geeky person with lots of time on hand. =p Ah-hah! But in any case, if you are interested to know, now that I mentioned it, check out this article.

So what are the top five?
1. Paste
2. Save
3. Copy
4. Undo
5. Bold

This may not be surprising to most of us. Afterall, many of us do alot of "copy" from the web browser and "paste" onto our reports right? lol. And since we don't want to lose of precious document as we all know it may just crash any minute, we have learned to saved our documents meticulously over the years. But of cuz, there's more "copy" and "paste" to be done before we make our report just right! Occasionally, the "undo comes in really useful. After all that content is done, we will need to do some formating, so we will "bold" some texts. I think you get the idea...

Some stats from the article: "Together, these five commands account for around 32% of the total command use in Word 2003. Paste itself accounts for more than 11% of all commands used, and has more than twice as much usage as the #2 entry on the list, Save."

Well these statistics maybe seemingly useless to us, they are very important to developers. By collecting these data from the users (through auto reporting in the case of MS Word), developers are able to find out what features are important and useful to users. In fact, I learned about the "MS Word Top 5 Most Used Commands" and this useful technique of designing software thru' observation in usability testing from this Jeff Atwood's article. And I think we should try this technique in experimental software projects that go thru' spiral development cycles. Most of the time, users do not really know what they want. Spiral development is a great way to quickly come up with a prototype for users to get a feel of what they like or dislike, and evolve to the final version. However, most of the time they are unable to articulate what they want. If we can observe how they use the software, as well as how they actually do their work, we'll be able to better develop software that help our users do their work more efficiently. At the same time, we can also concentrate our efforts on what is worthwhile. We will not have to make endless changes, and sometimes reverting certain changes. As the saying goes, "Listen more, talk less". I think in software development, we can start to "Observe more, do less" too.

What about asking? I think that is still necessary. We can apply Concept Engineering techniques used by new product development:
1. Selecting users who are experienced in the products for observations.
2. Asking open ended questions and record exactly what is said.
3. Select vivid descriptions and translate into requirements using Affinity Diagrams.
4. Prototyping the software for users to test and observe and discuss after they use them.
5. Modifying accordingly.

Techniques in defining the users' requirements:
1. Change in mindsets, users are the experts.
2. Put ourselves in users' context.
3. Intensively take to experts with open ended questions.
4. Listen and record carefully.
5. Composite panoramas of user concerns.
6. Consolidate into picture of users' priorities.

Many techniques in management of new product development can be adopted for software development. If only people start to focus on the bread and butter of software development and not just continuously giving users new products (put together by throwing in the latest technologies), which will be replaced in a couple of years.

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