Suppose you’re working on a complex piece of software with a due date that’s coming up fast. At the last minute, someone realizes that several of the help text popups contain typos. Is it worth fixing?
One thing I’ve noticed – and this is true in general, not just in software – is that a lot of people (and businesses) just don’t really care about what they might see as “little things” like this. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen misplaced apostrophes or quotation marks on business materials, even for large chain stores that presumably can afford graphic designers and proofreaders.
The argument for ignoring the “little things” is simple: most people probably won’t notice or care. I would argue, however, that taking the time to fix even a minor misspelling or grammatical error is worthwhile, for several reasons.
The obvious one is professionalism. All of the written content you put out is part of how you present yourself. When a business cuts corners on proofreading, I have to wonder what else they cut corners on. This seems particularly relevant in a field like software development where attention to detail can be extremely important.
Possibly more important, though, is the effect that sloppy writing can have on the ability of your customers to use your software. The amount of attention customers have is limited. Any little bit of that that’s being used up on understanding a poorly written prompt is attention that’s focused on your application instead of on the task the customer is attempting to complete.
This is one small element of a larger topic: keeping the software out of the way of the user. Ideally, when the user is attempting to accomplish a task with your software, the software should be intuitive and require minimal thought to use. If I’m creating a document in Word and I’m not using any special formatting, I don’t have to think about how to use the program; my attention is all on what I’m writing. Anytime I have to actually pay attention to the software – if, for example, I’m trying to typeset mathematics (in which case, yes, I really should be using LaTex) – it’s going to lower my productivity.
When designing and developing software, it’s worth asking: what are the pain points going to be for the user? Is it possible to smooth out those points, making the software simpler from an end user perspective even if that makes it more complicated behind the scenes?
We get paid to deal with complexity. Part of that complexity is figuring out how to make things as easy as possible for our users.