Your product is not as important to us as it is to you

I own a Mint. Is that a stupid name, or what? Especially when there's another hot product by that name which predates it. There's no way Mint will ever achieve the brand loyalty of Roomba, because its aficionados don't have a special word to use. I own a Mint. What's that??

A Mint is a Roomba for swiffing hard floors. And it's a great gadget, if pricey ($250). It quietly goes about its business, using a fixed infrared navigation beacon to build a map of your floor, chairs, stairs and other obstacles while it swiffs up the dust and cat hair. I really love it.

The other day, the power went out. And the Mint, which was recharging, went berserk. It started beeping and flashing its lights in a realistic display of a machine frightened out of its wits. "I'm without power! Saaaaaave me!!!"

Because, of course, in a major power outage, my first concern is whether my cleaning robot has enough charge left to swiff the bathroom.

This behavior obviously made sense to the machine's designers. They reasoned that if you were recharging your Mint, you'd want to know if that function failed. But imagine if all rechargeable appliances behaved this way. You'd go around from appliance to appliance, calming them down, unplugging their chargers, whispering reassuring words...

How does a design flaw like this happen? My belief it's because of the tunnel vision caused  by working day and night on a product, putting your heart and soul into it. To you, it's the most important thing in the world. So you tend to forget that for other people, it's just a minor aid to keeping floors clean. It's just not that important to us.

But that's not what prompted this blog post.

It was this:

This is the output from a Ruby on Rails upgrade tool. It checks your project to see what you might need to change to upgrade it from Rails 2 to Rails 3. An excellent utility.

But you can see that its designers too got caught up in the importance of their own work. If a message is important, why, let's display it in red! If it's less important, a subtle grey is best. And then let's use two more colors for other categories of information.

This is the equivalent of using <blink> on an HTML page. Dudes, it's a commandline console. We're not playing Nethack here. We can read simple black and white. But we can't read this because it assumes it's being run on a terminal with a black background! (It doesn't look any more attractive on such a terminal, but at least you can see what it says).

This mistake by the utility's designers arises, I think, from the same sense of the work product's self-importance shown in the Mint. In both cases, they were so focused on making their product useful that they didn't take a step back to consider it in the context of all the other products out there, of which their baby is just one.

Remember, it may be the most important thing in your life while you're working on it. But it's not the most important thing in our life.