October 2010
Beginner to intermediate
624 pages
24h 9m
English
Content preview from Making SoftwareBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 29. How Usable Are Your APIs?
In November 1999, I started working as a user experience researcher on the user experience team for Visual Studio. I was excited to be part of a team that designed the product I had used in my previous job. While working as a software developer at Motorola, I had always wanted to be able to make big improvements to the user experience of Visual Studio, and now I had my chance. But, although it seems obvious now, it took me almost a year to figure out that the way to improve the developer’s user experience wasn’t necessarily to focus exclusively on the development tools.
When I joined the team, I focused exclusively on achieving a deep understanding of the way that developers used Visual Studio. Together with my colleagues, we spent countless hours observing the experiences developers had creating new projects in Visual Studio, adding new classes to existing C++ projects, debugging web services, and many other experiences. We learned a great deal of useful information that enabled us to better understand our customers and how to apply that understanding to designing and building a great development tool.
But there was something missing. Although the developers’ experience with the development tool was getting better all the time, the overall developer experience wasn’t improving to the same extent. We needed to change focus. Instead of focusing on things that developers rarely do (how often do you create a new project compared to everything ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.