Chapter 36: The Installation Process

One more form of software communication deserves comment because it is the first communication your application will have with your customers: the installation process.

Most software development managers are fooled by the unproductive nature of installation programs, so they fail to see them as an opportunity (or a danger). If your installation process is a showcase of effective user interface design, the user will be in a good frame of mind as he begins to use your program in earnest. Conversely, if your installation process is cobbled together as an afterthought, your user will be disinclined to tolerate anything less than perfection in the balance of your product.

The Best Installation Is No Installation

Sometimes the best communication is none at all. Any IT manager worth his salary knows this is true for installation. Installation means maintenance updates. It means people deluging call centers with questions and problems. It means having to undo damage that users inadvertently do while trying to navigate through cumbersome, brain-dead installer interfaces.

Hatred of installation is one of the primary reasons why browser-based enterprise applications written in HTML have become omnipresent in corporate offices. No IT manager in his right mind wants to spend his time dealing with the hassle of endless installs and upgrades. To the IT manager, installation-free software is a godsend. Never mind the fact that browser-based Web applications are slow, interaction-poor, and cause no end of annoyance to users — the fact that they work across platforms and update themselves is a powerful persuasion to IT professionals, most of whom don't have to use the software they purchase.

The irony of the situation is that IT managers and even developers have conflated browser-based with installation-free. It's entirely possible to create non-browser–based, Internet-enabled applications that have all the interaction benefits of full desktop applications, yet have the same zero-install properties as any application you can access via a browser. Microsoft Office applications already support a shade of this in Windows XP through the Automatic Updates feature. It's a small step from there to permitting full automatic installation over the Internet or corporate intranet. Network-savvy applications have never been limited to browser technology, but the ease of cobbling together HTML-based software has done much to help developers overlook this fact. Client-server model applications can be created to provide all the benefits of browser-based software, but also to permit (depending on how much client-side processing the programmers are able to manage) the same richness of interaction that we used to expect of applications before HTML lowered all our expectations.