Program Design Pride

Everything associated with your company name says something about your company. I've always associated this with "branding" or "marketing," although I'm not sure if those are proper terms for it.

Small businesses often don't think they need to pay much attention to properly marketing themselves. I grew up in a small town where just opening a restaurant or new store was enough to get some attention.

SOMETHING IS DIFFERENT! WE MUST GO THERE TO FIND OUT WHAT THAT PLACE SELLS!

What many businesses fail to understand is how much little details can matter. I cringe when I see blatant typos on business signs. If they care that little about the sign board in front of their store, how much care must they take in their product or service? I know it's a fallacy to think that because a restaurant can't spell today's special properly it means they can't properly prepare it in the kitchen, but of all the things you have control over in running a business, a sign with programmable or movable lettering ranks rather high on the ease of quality control items.

Small businesses in my home town often have this problem. But more shocking are businesses with literally seven digits (at least) of profit flowing that make similar mistakes when creating an application to interact with their customers. I'm not talking about spelling errors but rather simple interface issues that leave me scratching my head wondering who thought this was a good idea. Some blatant earmarks of crappy design:

• The application is obviously an interface to your website. As in, you made an "app" that scales a mobile version of the website. If I want that I will bookmark your site. A bank I do business with seems to do this. When I have a problem with them, the application is another on the list that bugs me as I get wound up to talk to customer service.
• The application was designed for iPhone. Literally. As in, I launch the app on an iPad and the interface comes up as if the display is the size of an iPhone, rather than properly scaling to fit. That same bank app, as well as a healthcare company, both do this; fortunately they have a "2x" button to scale them to twice the iPhone size. It looks cheap and crappy. Don't do it. (Be sure to say the "fortunately" with a sarcastic tone in your head.)
• Make notifications obvious. My Google Hangouts app pulls this crap on me all the time; the icon wears a big numbered notification alert badge, I open the app, and I find no obvious reason for the notification. I click around, reading random requests and old chats, exit, and the same damn number is still there. WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL ME?!

Not being an iOS developer, I don't know how hard it is to fix these kinds of issues. As a fairly technical end user, I can say that in my opinion it makes the product look cheap and shoddy. Do they simply think their customers aren't worth the effort? Why did you bother making an application if you're not going to make it usable and high quality? I wonder if you didn't just throw something together by outsourcing the job just so you can claim to have something your competitors have.

I also wonder: what do the developers think? Were they forced into compromise, or were they hired as outsourced guns that don't care a whit for the company brand?

 

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