A surprisingly great feature
Maintaining bug vigilance and keeping a software-quality mindset more generally tends to make you look like a grump. There are just so many software flaws to notice. Sometimes, though, this sort of vigilance works the other way, and you're the one noticing something great while everyone else is grumbling.
At one of my big-company jobs, we used document software (Google Docs-style) that was widely disliked, and understandably so: it was slow, buggy, confusing, and ugly. But it had a wonderful feature: you could comment on a image and connect the resulting comment thread with a specific point in the image, not the whole image. This granularity is wonderful, especially when you're reviewing an architecture diagram.
It's a subtler feature than it might first seem to be:
- It requires a richer ontology of things that can be the anchor of a comment.
- It needs to keep working if a user resizes the image.
- The user needs to understand the relationship between the point in the image and the comment thread...
- ...without obscuring the image too much...
- ...even if there are several comment threads on a single image.
- I can't recall any other Web-based text document software that does this, including Google Docs, which is not known for lacking features.
I'm sure there are other subtleties that haven't come to mind yet. In what was usually a frustrating user experience, this specific feature was a joy to use: simple, clear, and useful.
I don't have a single major thesis to draw from this; rather:
- Do try to keep a keen eye not just for software failures but for unexpected lovely successes.
- Interactions between text and images are tough to get right in general.
- If you had anything to do with this feature, please let me buy you a drink. During years of my life that were full of user-hostile software features, this was a consistent bright spot.