“It’s broken”… says who?
Seth Godin did a presentation where he speaks about things being broken. He says that things are only broken if you think they are broken. Which means being broken is simply a matter of opinion. What’s broken to one person can be totally fine to another.
The problem with developing bug free software is not that it is impossible to remove coding errors, but that it is impossible to make a product that is not seen as “broken” by all of your users. Not all users will agree on the way you have implemented a feature, or how your software works in general.
One important point from the presenation which applies to software development is;
I’m not a fish
In the presentation, Seth gives examples of people who design things which they obviously have never used before. For example, a car interior where the cup holders are right in front of the air conditioner. Try placing a cup of coffee there every morning.
Your software is being developed for your users, not necessarily for you. You have to have the feedback of your actual users during development, otherwise you may make quick design decisions which actually prevent people from using your software effectively. Essentially limiting what your software can do (ie, you can’t use the A/C while using the cup holders).
In software development, often authors will try to do everything they can to tell users how to use a certain feature properly. However, the user may be so used to doing something a certain way that just by habit, they use the feature how they believe it should be used. It may never occur that instead of trying to “fix” the users behavior, they should fix the application’s behavior.
It’s much more expensive and time consuming to change design flaws later in development. Hopefully with TryBeta, you will be able to work with your users to come up with the most useful design implementations as early as possible.