Tedium in work-flows

Thu, 19 May 2016 00:00:00 +0530

I use Nikola for generating this blog. When creating a new post, it prompts for a title, and creates a file for the post.

Often I’m starting off with only a vague idea that needs to be fleshed out before it can be published (or discarded). It is quite difficult to come up with a title at this stage. I just want to start a draft and write things down!

I could use a “draft-title” and change it after finishing a post, but this feels tedious – requires 3 steps – change the title, post filename and post slug. The last two steps are optional, really, but I feel they are important especially when the original title is very different from the new one.

Being forced to come up with a title before anything else, feels tedious and, adds to the effort required to start off a new post. I shouldn’t really be worrying about the effort required to change the title of an unwritten post, but it happens subconsciously.

To work around this, I now have a “re-title utility” in my editor that takes care of all the tedious details. I can start with a random title, like Draft-1, and change it when I’m done with the post. I feel this is going to lead to a lot more drafts, at the very least, if not published posts.

Another work-flow related thing I came across recently was @Malabarba’s issue on CIDER (an IDE for Clojure in Emacs). The REPL takes a while to startup and this caused him to not use CIDER for running tests, if there wasn’t an already open REPL.

The tedium that people feel effects how they use the tool. Not surprisingly, making tedious-feeling tasks a breeze with the tool also effects how and how much they use it. Subtle variations in a work-flow could make or break it. How do you discover such potential work-flow make-or-break-ers? I think, these things would help:

Use the tool yourself (dog-food)
Talk to (or watch!) people using your tool
Look at work-flows in other similar tools
Thinking explicitly about various scenarios and simplifying or improving work-flows

I’d love to hear examples of this, and any ideas or thoughts you may have on identifying and fixing such things!

Error messages and new users

Tue, 17 May 2016 00:00:00 +0530

I was helping a friend of mine setup his blog and we were trying to use Hexo – a static site generator. We chose a Javascript based tool since he’s trying to learn Javascript. I skimmed through active Javascript projects in this list and finally zeroed down upon Hexo based on its popularity. I promised to help my friend to set this up, but he first tried to do it on his own and got back to me after an hour or so, quite frustrated and almost on the verge of giving up setting it up. I didn’t expect this from a tool that had so many stars, forks, plugins and so much active development.

We finally got it working, but we found that the error messages were horrendous – even for someone who has been using free and open-source tools for a while now. Printing out errors from compiler or interpreter directly along with the stack trace is almost always the worst thing to do for a tool/utility (as opposed to an API or library). The stack trace is definitely useful, for developers trying to build upon or improve your tool. Have a debug or development mode where developers can get all the information they need.

If you care about your users, especially new users, make sure you spend sufficient time on showing human-readable messages. If possible list the possible causes for every error along with tips for troubleshooting.

User-Experience on Noetic Nought

Tedium in work-flows

Error messages and new users