Steve Mehs
03-20-04, 12:09 PM
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This article was posted at AVS today, it’s from December, but still it makes a good read. I know it’s a long article, but if you skip around make sure to read the Final Thoughts at the end.
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What a strange situation. You take a mediocre product and rework the design to make it better. Your design is a success, by any reasonable measure, but the resulting new release is actually worse. You redouble your efforts and matters become untenable. It doesn’t matter how brilliant and effective your designs, the more they improve the product, the less usable the product becomes.
What could cause such a situation? Industrial sabotage? A rip in the seam of the universe? No, poor quality assurance (QA) procedures.
Dish Network, with its digital recorder/receivers, has shown evidence of this phenomenon for several years now, with no end in sight. They have recently released version 115 of their software for their model 721, and it appears to have almost as many bugs as their very first release. These bugs are not subtle. They are easily reproduced and, in a few cases, fatal. Their genesis, in several instances, appears to be a reworking of the interaction design of existing features. The new designs are a great improvement over what came before—or would be if they worked.
MORE (http://www.asktog.com/columns/059QualityAssurance.html)
This article was posted at AVS today, it’s from December, but still it makes a good read. I know it’s a long article, but if you skip around make sure to read the Final Thoughts at the end.
---
What a strange situation. You take a mediocre product and rework the design to make it better. Your design is a success, by any reasonable measure, but the resulting new release is actually worse. You redouble your efforts and matters become untenable. It doesn’t matter how brilliant and effective your designs, the more they improve the product, the less usable the product becomes.
What could cause such a situation? Industrial sabotage? A rip in the seam of the universe? No, poor quality assurance (QA) procedures.
Dish Network, with its digital recorder/receivers, has shown evidence of this phenomenon for several years now, with no end in sight. They have recently released version 115 of their software for their model 721, and it appears to have almost as many bugs as their very first release. These bugs are not subtle. They are easily reproduced and, in a few cases, fatal. Their genesis, in several instances, appears to be a reworking of the interaction design of existing features. The new designs are a great improvement over what came before—or would be if they worked.
MORE (http://www.asktog.com/columns/059QualityAssurance.html)