Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

Most developers spend a lot of time learning. Who can claim an entire lifetime career invested in a single language, or platform?…VB6 to C# to TSQL to JavaScript to Ruby and so on. Sure there are plenty of professions that don’t necessitate quite the same level of time investment in learning the tools of a ‘craft’, but if you stand still you should expect to go nowhere.

I have worked with lots of different types over the years and developers are no different to most, there will always be people at work who think they are simply ‘entitled’, owed a sweet ride; some think their employers owe it to them, others think their colleagues do and in society some think their government does. Lately with the whole Windows 8, Silverlight / WPF ‘will they’, ‘wont they’ deliberations in the developer community, there has been some resentful noises emanating from developers who feel left behind by Microsoft who have gone as far to express fear for their careers and encouraged others to follow suit. I find this staggering, lacking self belief, lazy and in some cases cynical attention seeking rabble rousing.

I have invested plenty in WPF but when it comes down to it, if I have to learn something new because there is simply something better?…then I welcome the education. Perhaps had I been ahead of my time I might have incited a riot when VB6 was outmoded by .NET 1.0, instead I chose to see it as an opportunity, at the time I was faced with either moving on to Java, Swing AWT , JSP and J2EE or to .NET, WinForms, ASP.Net and all the wonderment of web services and remoting (tongue firmly plated in cheek).

Personally I don’t believe Microsoft is about to abandon XAML but if they do then I will treat it as an opportunity and expect that history will show me not to be alone.

An interesting discussion on UI layout came up the other day regarding when / where / how it was appropriate for business rules to surface to the User Interface . The topic of the discussion was based around the value of consistently and explicitly directing user attention to an entities state on a User interface versus omitting information to infer its meaning, where the inference (by way of omission) was extracted from a break to the repetition of the layout. Phew, a mouthful I know but bear with me for just a moment longer!

It would be helpful to the discussion at this point to display the UI in question and then pick it apart. I am showing only the relevant portion of the screen that was subject to the discussion, in this case the twenty four hour digital clock. Each line item in this dashboard contains a due time and indication as to the amount of days or months passed or to follow. The screen shot shows three line items where:

1. Is due in 10 days at 5:38 PM
2. Is due today at 5:26 PM
3. Is due in 10 days at 4:16 PM

Things to note: the ‘number of days indicator’ (below) and digital clock are both right aligned, placed in close proximity to each other and each element is repeated regardless of their values, establishing a unified consistent layout.




The Debate

To understate the debate better there is one feature of the underlying business logic that should be understood first; a high percentage of jobs are turned around in the same day, meaning the ‘number of days indicator’ will exhibit the value of “TODAY” at a high frequency. 

One suggestion in the discussion was that given that the large percentage of due dates would evaluated as “TODAY” then it would make sense to omit it. The logic behind this is that most jobs get done “TODAY” making it almost a default value.  Here (to the left) is what it would look like if we enacted the business logic on the layout of he user interface and looking at the result the converse arguments become clear:

1. It creates trapped whitespace.
2. It is less organised through loss of repetition.
3. It is less unified with the loss of proximity.

The other effect of removing the ‘number of days indicator’ is that users will have to be trained in the rule that the omission has a specific meaning. If most line items would show “TODAY” then its likely that the repetition of the text or trapped whitespace would make it possible to spot the exceptions, however the loss of organisation in the layout through the introduction of trapped whitespace makes it more difficult to discern, even with a ‘squint test’ where the user deliberately searches the screen for the items with an empty value in the ‘number of days indicator’.

In writing this post it also became clear that the upper case rendering of characters in the ‘number of days indicator’ needs to change with a view to making it less cluttered and achieving better contrast with the 24 hour clock.

All in all a very useful discussion where the debate continues testing the principles in place and highlights the need to retain some simple, subtle yet effective design choices that continue to be refactored through the iterations of the application.

In a time where mankind had come to think of itself as highly evolved, there was a technology princess known as JezebelScript. She was a Queen in waiting and in her latter years she strode throughout the land upon her faithful horse who went by the name High.

JezebelScript roamed upon High Horse, preaching her gospel to any and all that would listen; “free yourself from the hub of central control and lay seed at the root of communication” she cried. The arbiters of the peoples forums were locked in debate, a dark cloud of quandary hovered, alas so many prophets, so many gospels, even at the seat of power there seemed to be great confusion in how to best identify the “one true way”¹.

The Princesses message was simple, her key tenet was “freedom in Ubiquity” and as her powers grew as the message took root. The Oligarchs of the day were seduced by her call and they too began to preach her message, concordantly  it appeared to be reaching its crescendo, her followers gained strength in numbers, they began flexing muscles of vindication in the hallways of the propaganda machines. And then a metamorphosis took shape…something unexpected in this rich time of spiritual and intellectual evolution, the followers of JezebelScript came to outnumber those who followed the false prophets, an ugly mob mentality which had been festering, manifested itself in an un-mandated charge to suppress the new minority. The airwaves became filled with bile, hatred and self serving pronouncements of worship to JezebelScript, they shouted her name as though it laid claim to legitimacy. Finally it seemed the oppressed were now becoming the oppressor.

Her story is ongoing, her epitaph yet to be written and who knows she just may end up capturing the hearts and minds of those who have until now ignored her dance of seduction.

¹ Billy Hollis “Living in peaceful co-existence”