Chapter 8: Under the Hood

Overview

Part I of this book dealt with usability issues from the GUI perspective. Now it’s time to shift the focus to what’s under the hood—the innards, the guts of your software. Some people might be surprised to learn that the inner workings of your software have just as much of an impact on usability as the more visual GUI aspects of your programs.

In the following sections I provide you with some general issues that you should concern yourself with in your software development; handling these issues correctly will help you prevent bugs in your software and create better, more useable software.

REAL WORLD SCENARIO: Unscrew the Bottle Cap? No Thanks, I Like My Epidermis Just the Way It Is.

Some bottles—particularly beer bottles, but this is a family book (so be sure to read it to your kids)—have caps on them that are supposedly screw-off. Right. Yup. I can just hear the skin on my thumb and index finger ripping off, shred by shred. Isn’t that a nice thought?

What in the world would possess somebody to make such a terror? Those old can tabs that you pulled off were a problem because they would sometimes fall into the soda cans (or get thrown out beside the highway), resulting in either choking or littering. Didn’t we learn from that? No, today we have the screw-off bottle caps.

Ever since I was introduced to these some time back, I have opted for the bottle opener approach to opening them. And it works. So I suppose we could argue that the engineers did us a favor by providing us with an option. (Are there bottle engineers? I’m not sure, but I suppose somebody had to design these things.) The option is that I can either screw off the cap (no thank you) or take it off with a bottle opener.

Maybe the idea is that if you’re in a place where you don’t have a bottle opener (like driving down the road? Not a good idea if it’s beer!), then you’ll still be able to open the bottle, albeit at the minor cost of a few layers of epidermis and possibly a small amount of blood. But if you’re really thirsty and stranded in Death Valley and all you have is a bottle of America’s Finest Brewskie, then maybe this little pain and bloodshed would be well worth it. (Although they say drinking alcohol while you’re dehydrated only makes it worse.)

Recently, however, I did discover that if I hold a rag in my hand, I can unscrew the cap without tearing my skin. However, I must admit, the truth is I’ve never actually tried unscrewing the cap with my bare hands. Maybe I would surprise myself and discover my own inner Superman abilities. Or maybe not; I am a piano player, after all, and like to keep my hands reasonably intact.

Fortunately, writing software rarely results in actual damage to one’s person. And maybe we can take a lesson from the bottle engineers: They developed a device that serves two types of users: the manly men out there with thick, rugged skin (quite literally) and those of us goofy people who do things like, oh I don’t know, play the piano and program computers. Now that’s usability in a bottle!