We don’t have to build it all
I was reading Lou’s post about an old article about spelling on ebay and the NY Times article about the same and noticed something that I thought was particularly interesting. From the ebay education guy:
“When will eBay get a spell checker?” His answer? “You go to a store called a bookstore, and you buy something called a dictionary.”
It reminded me that we actually don’t have to build every little thing that people think they want. Yes, a spell checker on ebay might be a good idea, but there are probably lots of good ideas that, when added up, would clutter the screen and make the whole thing a lot more complicated. Just like most of the difficult-to-use bloatware we have now…
January 29th, 2004 at 11:55 pm
While I agree with most of above, I still think that on eBay a spell-checker would be nice.
The way Plastic does it, it really doesn’t get in the way.
February 2nd, 2004 at 8:12 am
I think you’re right when you say that we don’t have to build everything that everyone wants.
The secret is to test our assumptions against the design (by that I mean the users, personas or whatever mechanism for design your using), and then try to get buy-in into the appropriate solution.
Quite often you don’t get the appropriate solution out because the stakeholders in the development process have there own views on what’s being asked for and what *they* would want. At the end of the day is what’s going to be delivered.
The eBay developers are lucky because they have a public common sense filter but in my experience they are an exception to the rule.
p.s I wish there was a spell checker on these comment boxes
July 11th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
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July 11th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
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