It has been an excellent winter for working outdoors. Many warm spells. Not much snow, mud, or frozen ground. Zero sweat, sunburn or biting flies. Most days, the routine here has been daytime physical labor, then programming our new accounting software during the long evenings.
The big project right now is 300 feet of French drains to handle runoff from the neighbors. Step one is trench digging, with the soil going into raised beds for gardening. Then add a 4″ corrugated drain, plus a water line for irrigation. Finally, fill with many tons of crushed rock (slag?) that a previous owner piled onto everything not lawn. Removing it lets us use those spaces for planting. The project kills three birds with two stones.
Last week was warm enough to assemble a greenhouse kit from Amazon. Sadly, the build process was a nightmare, with instructions even worse than Ikea’s. It took 27 hours, mostly puzzling over what goes where, and redoing whatever went to the wrong where.
Good human interface design takes time and skill, but it’s worth the effort. This build would have gone twice as fast if it were set up better. It lacked 1/2/3 instruction steps, simple part labeling with up/inside/outside markers, photos for difficult areas, and maybe tricks like matching color dots where pieces connect. Instead, the project was such a brain-drain that it left no energy for programming afterwards. It cost us quality time, not just time.
User interface is even more important for accounting software. It will be used for hundreds or thousands of hours, so every time-saver (or time-suck) has a big impact. Our staff runs each screen and function many times to test and debug, so we also want it easy for selfish reasons. Plus we manage a couple of businesses with it, and have to suffer any flaws.
Right now the main focus is progress bars. They aren’t that complicated, but moving them from Goldenseal to the new accounting app is tricky. The work is about half done.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
