Missing Features

It’s amazing that engineers have been designing software for nearly 50 years and still time and time again software development stakeholders forgot about the importance setting good defaults.

What is a good default? A good default is evidence that you understand your user’s workflow in your product. A good default makes software more efficient by getting the needless out of the way of the task.

A great example of a software program that doesn’t understand good defaults is the dreadful PHP-based webmail client IMP Horde.

Here is a screen shot of the first page a user sees after login:

The first screen a user it taken to is blank! This astounding lack of good design is mind boggling. What do 95% of users want to do when logging into a webmail client? Read their email.

When you design software you are really designing work flow. This is both easy and hard. Hard in the sense that you have to think (and be smart) to design good work flow. But easy in the sense that when you get the design right, it just works.

If you design software, take a moment to think: Do we set good defaults?

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