Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Get off my back!
Okay, all that patience-and-tolerance stuff that I preached last time about how Allen's email ticked me off, but then he followed up with and long and reasonably convincing face-to-face explanation? Forget it. Well, maybe don't forget it, per se, but there are certainly limits to that approach.
I made a few more additions and improvements to the Requirements tab yesterday, and asked Allen this morning if he had any feedback on it. "There's your first mistake!" I hear you saying, but in reality, it was inevitable. As I said last time, I can't very well expect to just do everything myself how I jolly well please and then expect everyone else to like it or lump it. And by actually asking for the feedback, I look like a "team player." I also asked him to email the feedback to me so that I'd have a written record to refer to (but the real reason was that I didn't want to put up with him talking at me for another half-hour).
Well, I got what I asked for, all right! 16 bullet points, 31 lines, and 316 words (according to Word's Word Count feature). My favorite, I believe, was the suggestion that I make the the "minimum size" for the Add dialog bigger so that it doesn't look dumb when people resize it to the minimum amount. They can, of course, immediately resize it so that it's larger again, but apparently we don't want to subject them even for a moment to the horrific sight of having to see the dialog smaller than it was ever intended to be. Remember: this is an internal app!
My least favorite suggestion concerned the moving of the Other Requirements text box from the Requirements tab to the Add dialog box. We had discussed this earlier; he favored putting it in the Add dialog, while I favored the Requirements tab. Since I'm the one doing the implementation, by golly, I put it in the Requirements tab. A reasonable person, finding themselves disagreeing with my decision, would have either talked to me personally, or, since I asked for an email, said something to the effect of, "You know, I really think that the Add dialog is a better place for that, because of blah and also blah and blah."
Did Allen do this? He did not. Instead, he wrote this:
- Remove the button labeled 'Remove "Other"'
- Change the "Other" checkbox to a label
- Move the "Other" label and associated edit field to the "Add Requirement" dialog
- In place of using a checkbox to determine the presence or absence of an "Other" field, use the presence of text in the "Other" edit box to signify the presence of an "Other" requirement.
- When there is text (such as "This is sample requirement") in the "Other" edit box on the "Add Requirement" page, make it show up in the list of Requirements and make it look something like the following: ("Other Requirement: This is a sample requirement")
- Decide between using "Other" or "Other Requirement" for the label as well as the text shown in the list view
- Consider using a descriptive label that explains how to use the "Other" edit field
In other words, he simply gave me step-by-step instructions for moving this feature one item at a time from one form to the other. Are you kidding me?! This man is insane! I mean seriously, what normal person would do this?
Sure enough, a few minutes after the email arrived, he came by and wanted to talk about the items. I was still fuming from the email itself and in absolutely no mood to discuss it, so I told him I was leaving for lunch in a few minutes. He said okay, just come get me when you get back. Needless to say, I did not come and get him, and fortunately he didn't bug me all afternoon.
The interesting postscript to all this is that after the email I went over to Jamie and asked her which way she preferred, and without any prompting, designed a solution that was essentially exactly like Allen's. So I switched it over. The point, however, is Allen's extremely oddball way of reiterating his suggestion to me.
I made a few more additions and improvements to the Requirements tab yesterday, and asked Allen this morning if he had any feedback on it. "There's your first mistake!" I hear you saying, but in reality, it was inevitable. As I said last time, I can't very well expect to just do everything myself how I jolly well please and then expect everyone else to like it or lump it. And by actually asking for the feedback, I look like a "team player." I also asked him to email the feedback to me so that I'd have a written record to refer to (but the real reason was that I didn't want to put up with him talking at me for another half-hour).
Well, I got what I asked for, all right! 16 bullet points, 31 lines, and 316 words (according to Word's Word Count feature). My favorite, I believe, was the suggestion that I make the the "minimum size" for the Add dialog bigger so that it doesn't look dumb when people resize it to the minimum amount. They can, of course, immediately resize it so that it's larger again, but apparently we don't want to subject them even for a moment to the horrific sight of having to see the dialog smaller than it was ever intended to be. Remember: this is an internal app!
My least favorite suggestion concerned the moving of the Other Requirements text box from the Requirements tab to the Add dialog box. We had discussed this earlier; he favored putting it in the Add dialog, while I favored the Requirements tab. Since I'm the one doing the implementation, by golly, I put it in the Requirements tab. A reasonable person, finding themselves disagreeing with my decision, would have either talked to me personally, or, since I asked for an email, said something to the effect of, "You know, I really think that the Add dialog is a better place for that, because of blah and also blah and blah."
Did Allen do this? He did not. Instead, he wrote this:
- Remove the button labeled 'Remove "Other"'
- Change the "Other" checkbox to a label
- Move the "Other" label and associated edit field to the "Add Requirement" dialog
- In place of using a checkbox to determine the presence or absence of an "Other" field, use the presence of text in the "Other" edit box to signify the presence of an "Other" requirement.
- When there is text (such as "This is sample requirement") in the "Other" edit box on the "Add Requirement" page, make it show up in the list of Requirements and make it look something like the following: ("Other Requirement: This is a sample requirement")
- Decide between using "Other" or "Other Requirement" for the label as well as the text shown in the list view
- Consider using a descriptive label that explains how to use the "Other" edit field
In other words, he simply gave me step-by-step instructions for moving this feature one item at a time from one form to the other. Are you kidding me?! This man is insane! I mean seriously, what normal person would do this?
Sure enough, a few minutes after the email arrived, he came by and wanted to talk about the items. I was still fuming from the email itself and in absolutely no mood to discuss it, so I told him I was leaving for lunch in a few minutes. He said okay, just come get me when you get back. Needless to say, I did not come and get him, and fortunately he didn't bug me all afternoon.
The interesting postscript to all this is that after the email I went over to Jamie and asked her which way she preferred, and without any prompting, designed a solution that was essentially exactly like Allen's. So I switched it over. The point, however, is Allen's extremely oddball way of reiterating his suggestion to me.
# posted by Bruce Hansen @ 3:33 PM 
