Alex Pooley's Blog

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This statistic amazed me - almost 50% of ATM transactions in Australia during August 2005 were through “other bank” ATM’s. So if you are with Westpac but used a Commonwealth Bank ATM then you would be using an “other bank” ATM. It’s suprising because other bank ATM usage usually costs a couple of dollars and I’m a scrooge when it comes to that type of thing. Anyway, I’m slowly getting the impression that the majority of people are willing to pay for convenience, even though I’d rather hike it to the nearest ATM owned by my bank to avoid paying those silly fees.

Try before you buy is a good way to win over a user. I’ve looked to try a heap of services lately on the Internet but they all want my credit card details to sign me up straight away after the trial period ends. Consequently I don’t sign up for the trial and hence I never sign up for their service. I created an Internet site running in a similar fashion once. Many people made it part way through the process but then balked when they realised they needed to enter credit card details. I don’t blame them.

Software is created to solve a problem. Sometimes a software package will solve many related problems.

You know those shots of NASA control in movies where there’s a stack of people and all these buttons, dials, displays, and so forth? That’s pretty similar to how we use software today with our menus, buttons, icons, links, input devices. The ideal situation for NASA would probably be one display, one headset, and a little button that says ‘Go’. Fantasy? Yeh, stuff doesn’t always work properly and there’s always unexpected events so you need all those people, outputs, etc otherwise people might die and lots of money will go down in flames. However! For those of us looking to build software for Mummy’s recipe books, you don’t need a zillion menu items, buttons, links. Screw it, why have a menu bar at all? “Add entry”, “Delete Entry”, “Modify Entry”, “Search” with massive _massive_ buttons. Easy!

OK, so you can build and modify your recipe book but what about more advanced features? Say things like, exporting to comma seperated files or our beloved XML format. Other advanced features like uploading recipes to a website. What about potential integration with supermarkets so that you can order ingredients straight from your recipe book by pushing a button and then the ingredients are ready for you to pick up on your way home from work. No wait! _What about_ if you integrate payment gateways, with supermarket ordering, _and_ integration with your fridge using bluetooth so you only order ingredients you need and everything is automatically paid for. Brilliant!…. oh hang on a second, Mum’s using her old cookbooks again. But wait… some rich nerds are using the software now.

I’ll admit, some of that is really cool. And, if you want to be like the other feature packed mediocre products out there then go for it. I’m not saying it’s not possible to created elegant feature packed software, but it’s way harder and you need plenty of resources.

I’m taking my chances with something that solves a problem but hopefully does it better than alternative products. I’ll go from there.