I started very complexly using Stack and LinkedList, making my own methods to validate and add and remove segments so that the whole thing would work cohesively, and then it was pointed out to me that we didn’t really need to take into account both ends of each segment, we might as well just treat it as the next segment takes its start from the last.

So I simplified my objects all the way back to a simple list and a validator on submit – but that left how was I going to do the graphing?

It’s in a winforms .NET application, so I thought maybe there was a graphing library, or I could use lines and the drawing primatives, but I needed some values on the axis and all that.

Anyway, had a quick think and came up with the ReportViewer control! We already use Reporting Services for a lot of our reporting and the users are familiar with that, but I’d never done it with an in-memory set of data, using the local version.

Half an hour later I had a spiked test version done and ready for smoothly bringing it back into the main project.  Seriously, I had visions of such complexity, for something that could resolve itself so easily, and the boss had no qualms about using that control in the production application.

Sometimes you just need to take a step back and stop banging your head on the desk long enough for the ideas to come through to you – and remember to keep things as simple as possible and they’ll often work.

The quote was about how easy it is to develop for the Sony Playstation 3, from Kaz Hirai:

“We don’t provide the ‘easy to program for’ console that [developers] want, because ‘easy to program for’ means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?” explained Hirai.

I guess what he was meaning was that the Playstation is technologically advanced and there’s a learning curve involved that there will always be more limits to push in it for the next 10 years.

However, what he has said is why make it easy on people to develop for, when we can make them learn over the next 9 1/2 years how to do it the best way – it’s like a challenge!

Do you know what you get if you make it easier to develop to the best of the consoles strengths straight off the bat?  What’s the advantage?

NINE AND A HALF YEARS OF BRILLIANT GAMES.

That would be awful for a games console wouldn’t it? A glut of quality games would be ridiculous.

Okay, it’s a stupid thing to say, but it’s something to remember when we’re developing our own user interfaces – do we spend the time trying to figure the easiest way possible for someone to interact with our software, or do we allow complexity?

There’s a learning curve, there’s how quickly someone can become productive, how much we introduce a reliance on a particular person to do their job.

I don’t know how many times I have talked to someone about how someone is irreplaceable because of the knowledge that one person has for a system or procedure, how much training it would take to replace them, and retrain someone else.

Great, that person is intrenched and has fantastic job security – but on the flip-side you’ve effectively made it so that person can’t be promoted, and you’d have second thoughts shifting them to a different job if they actively sought it.

So it’s never doing the person or the company a favour – complexity in usability is bad, if only because one day you’ll get the call to support what it does and have to remember yourself.