Why do programmers ignore user experience?
I am doing a series for my Maker Hacks blog and channel about getting kids into making, and it is revealing a surprising amount of bad user experiences.
User experience is super important anyway, but keeping kids engaged means maximum progress, maximum fun, and an absolute minimum of frustration.
Problems come when you give programmers and technologists development work and you do not fit user experience into the scope. You can't just rely on any old solutions that pass unit tests!
Take the micro:bit as an example.
Everything about the hardware is great. The coding side is not perfect but it works.
The mobile experience is shockingly bad.
Like "how have they not tried to fix this already" bad.
One of the apps was developed by Samsung, the other by a company who's name escapes me but their brand is stuck in the 1990s.
Both "work" like they couldn't be bothered. It's hard to connect to bluetooth, when it does connect it disconnects and won't let you reconnect, and the device features don't work on iOS devices anyway.
Remember this product is targeted at kids of an age where their main computer device is going to be mobile.