I'll better my life as a designer, promised...

As you may read on my blogs I sometimes write for pdalive.com about using my smartphone and evaluating software on it. My last post was about Windows Mobile 6.1 on my TYTN II. Although the update was minor (from 6.0 to 6.1 is a small step after all), there is something in this update that made me realize something important about creating updates of my own software.


There is a couple of things in WM 6.0 that I always did wrong. E.g. when I want to lock my phone, I press and hold the red 'hang up' button. This locks the device so I can't make an accidental call to someone (something that happened quite a lot before I made a habbit of locking my phone). But, when you lock the phone, it locks with the current application in front. Most of the times I want the home screen active before I lock it. So, I made a habbit of activating the home screen before I locked the device. Frequently this means unlocking the phone, activating the home screen, and lock the phone again. But, I also want the first page of the HTC pluging (which displays a clock) active. So, most of the times, I unlock the phone yet another time, activate the first page on the HTC plugin before locking it finally.

Besides all the 'major' improvements in the WM 6.1 update, this is something that either Microsoft or HTC now does for me. Whenever you press and hold the read 'hang up' button, the home screen is made the active application and the first page of the HTC plugin is selected before locking the device. Apparently, other users found themselves performing the same procedure as I did in WM 6.0.

Now, what's all this got to do with my life as a designer? Well, I realized that I was very please to find such a small improvement in a new release of the software. It's not something a sales person can use to sell additional licenses with, but it is a change that makes the life of a uses just that tiny bit better.

I want to add more of such things to the releases of our own software. I want my users to get the same pleased feeling about our software when they start using a new release. I want them constantly thinking: hey, that's great! Simply because a little function or feature just does it's job a bit better.

From a commercial point of view it might be much better to have big new features in your release (like support flow charts in our upcoming main release version 6). But, and that is the promise, I will make sure that version 6.1 will have a big focus on all those little things that can make you go oooh. I think in the end, that will pay off, even from a commercial point of view.

Bye,
Bart