What Kind Of A User Moves Files Around?
Here’s a nice real-world story from which we can all learn a lot about usability, design and quality in general.
Everybody knows Google Desktop. As it happens, Google Desktop has a problem with re-indexing files if you move them from one location to another on your hard drive. According to this article, the solution is reinstalling the application and re-indexing the entire drive. Ooops… this can be quite annoying if you happen to move your files every now and then.
My motto is “expect the unexpected”, but let’s face it, you should start with expecting the things which are expected. Creating a file search tool and not expecting that users will move files around is a serious design problem. Unless the developers of the application assumed that once you have a state of the art search mechanism you have no reason to move files around anymore. One way or the other, this is no comfort for the users who do need to move some files occasionally.
Without knowing anything about the internals of the product, I assume that this problem originates in the product’s design. This doesn’t sound like a programming bug to me. If that is really the case, it might take a long time to fix this issue. The cost: customers’ frustration, loss of customers, and damaged reputation. All this might be irrelevant at this point in time to a company like Google, but why take such a chance when competition is breathing down your neck.
The least Google had to do is to be aware of this problem and let users know about the product’s limitation (I assume they didn’t based on the article linked above). If most users don’t care about moving files around, such a note would have made no difference to them. Users who do need to move files could have used such a note for making an informed decision regarding the installation of this software. They wouldn’t have been caught by surprise when they find out the application doesn’t do what it is expected to. This would have increased customers’ trust in the product and in its creators, even if its functionality were still limited.
