Eliminating Excise in Software Design

One of the biggest problems with softwares these days is the number of steps we need to perform to accomplish a simple task. More often than not, once we get used to doing the same thing over and over again, we arrive at the conclusion that the steps are unavoidable and plowing through them good naturedly might just make them seem more acceptable.

Excise is the extra work that satifies the needs of our tools or those of outside agents as we try to achieve our objectives. The problem with excise tasks is that the effort we expend in doing them doesn’t go directly towards accomplishing our goals.
Alan Cooper, Robert Reinmann & David Cronin

Since virtually any issue in software development is virtually solvable (no pun intended), here are a few examples of good software design that does not change the world, but impressed me on how silently they helped me be more productive and a lot more pleasant.

Crystal Report applications contain a workspace zoom slider on the bottom right corner of the workspace. For experienced users who tend to enlarge and minimize their reports numerous times during the design phase, this slider is easily accessible and reduces the number of clicks they need to access the function (zoom functionality is also available through the View dropdown menu, and it requires a minimum of three clicks to perform the same action).

Dreamweaver 8 and Dreamweaver CS3 have a panel of butcons (button icons) on the left side of the coding panel. These butcons provide quick and easy access to many Dreamweaver functions for the coder without him ever needing to move too far from the coding panel. Most times, only a slight flick of the wrist is needed to use these functions.

The Firefox search functionality is another example of an extremely well thought user interaction. Using the global keyboard shortcut Ctrl-F, a user can immediately start typing after invoking the search function. With each keypress, the browser starts highlighting matched occurrences of the string typed with a green background. When there are no matches, the background of the search textbox immediately turns red, indicating to the user there are no matches. The best part of this search is how painless it is to use. A user can perform multiple searches on a page without needing to clear the search textbox. This search function also does not require any mouse intervention – a good plus for the experienced user.

Opera does a number of things with its tabbing functionality. First, if the browser is closed and reopened, it automatically reopens the last tabs that were active right before the browser was closed. It’s not necessary feature, but a highly desirable one. Opera also provides tab previews for inactive tabs. Simply hover over the tab and a screenshot of the tab being previewed will appear. The only caveat to this functionality is it sometimes takes a little longer for previews to appear if you’ve been away from the browser for a while; thus making it easier to click on the tab instead of waiting for a preview.

With all the different possibilities of communication mediums that bombard us now, traditional ways of creating a contact management system have to be revamped to accommodate the new mediums. For example, Microsoft Outlook provides a dropdown to choose unique labels for a contact. This allows the user to choose the most descriptive label to define the content he is adding in. A note though to these types of systems – it would be even better if the user is allowed to add his own label in case none of the choices given matches his content.