Compassion-Driven Development

I have been developing software for a pretty long time now. I have worked on a lot of systems in a lot of different environments. In several of these places my orientation process included a visit to the place where the end users were, a call center or client site or whatever, to see what they did and how they used the system. Oddly enough, this usually happened once when I first started, but pretty much never again.

I recently wrapped up a project that afforded me an opportunity I had never had before as a software developer. I sat with my end users every day. I lived with them. This may sound like a bad idea, and in many cases it might be, but in this particular context I loved it. I have never had such a tight feedback loop. I could push out a new feature and within five minutes hear someone down the row yell, "Hey, look at this!"

Not only did it give me the chance to experience their reactions to my work, but more importantly it gave me the chance to see what they needed. While we geeks love to complain about users asking too much, sometimes they ask too little. Being in the midst of these folks gave me the chance to see them doing what they did everyday. They were working with a legacy system that left a lot to be desired in the way of user experience, and they had come to accept far too many inconveniences as facts of life. They were doing so many manual tasks that were easy to incorporate into the system. They had built processes around design flaws and browser limitations.

They may have had ideas, complaints, and requests, as users always do, but they often overlooked the most obvious things. There is pain in every job, and sometime users can't quite imagine how software improvements could relieve it. Or maybe they've lived with the pain for so long that it no longer occurs to them that they're wasting time and energy. Being with these folks every day as they worked gave me the chance to say to them, "You should not have to do this."

I call this Compassion-Driven Development.