Contrary to popular belief, "the user" is not an all-powerful being that exists only to play games against sprites. But the truth is out there... somewhere...

Fax Modem and Data Nully from Reboot\

Awesome 90's cartoons aside, there are things that we can learn from the user! The past few weeks I've been re-desiging a lot of the web user interfaces here at work. I've found that when I'm given a chance to update an already designed UI, I can pretty much copy the old style and just give it a "web 2.0" boost and add in some new functionality - no biggie. But when given a completely new projectthat is done from scratch, I start to get a bit lost.

The reason I bring this up is because last sprint I was given a chance to make a new web tool for some of our in-house support staff to use. This tool replaces some minor SQL query's that I would do on a day to day basis, so I was already pretty familiar with the project. Initially I threw together what I thought to be an all-in-one awesome bone-crushing tool that did everything it had to... and more! However! Upon dropping this tool on our support staff, it became readily apparent that they were not terribly familiar with all aspects of this particular system, and had no idea how to use my brand new shiny tool. Oops! Looks like my user interface doesn't fit the job!

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