Over Engineered

We have a piano in the dining room at home which means we don’t really have room for a dining table. We searched for months to find a gate fold table which could be left folded against the wall most of the time, but all we could find were ones that looked like they’d just been lifted from a Victorian home.

Eventually we found one at the Ideal Homes exhibition in London, ironically made by a company a few miles from home in Leatherhead. It was very expensive but we had to have it because the leaves were fitted with pistons which slowly lift each leaf once it they have been given a manual start. The piston isn’t strong enough to keep the leaf in an upright position for use, so you still have to scramble under the table to fold out the gate, therefore rendering the piston pretty pointless – over engineered if you like.

I’m thinking about this now because we’ve just bought a new suite for the front room and the two poufs have magazine storage compartments inside, and you’ve guessed it the lids have pistons on them. These are a little more useful because they keep the lid up while you rifle through months of magazines trying to find the article you are after, and prevent the lid from falling on your head.

It turns out they are not the only pistons in the house, we have a soft closing toilet seat which is essentially a piston too. I think this clearly falls into the over engineered category, I’ve certainly never worried about the toilet lid falling on my head.

All of this got me wondering about what else we have that is over engineered and whether I’m guilty of doing it too.

How do you open a document on your computer? Double click on it, right click on it and select Open from the menu, open the application first and then select the Open command and search for the file, or maybe you drag it onto the open application. That’s four different ways to do the same thing, and I can’t help thinking that there’s probably a fifth way that I’ve forgotten.

Surely we don’t need all those ways to open a document. You can make a very good argument that the piston examples add to the desirability of the product and make them sexier in some way – it was the main reason for us buying the gate fold table after all. But does the number of ways I can open a document in Windows affect whether I buy it or prefer iOS instead.

If some people use the options and find them useful or easier then what’s wrong with adding them? It makes the software more complicated that’s what. Somebody has to spend the time writing the alternate functionality, somebody else has to test it, if you have comprehensive documentation somebody needs to add it to the user manual or online tutorials, and if it fails it will take time and resources to fix it.

Having said that the latest web site data entry tool I’ve been working on has almost as many ways of editing a record as Windows has for opening a document. You can double click on it, right click and select Edit from the context menu, single click to view the record and then press the Edit button in the view window.

After reading what I’ve said above you are probably wondering why I did that. Well, I guess it’s because we think our users expect it.

It’s a lame excuse and it would be better to know whether our users do use these functions, although now that we’ve added them it seems pointless taking them out, it’s not like a piston which adds to the ongoing production costs.

At a recent conference I sat in a talk about the IOT or Internet Of Things for the uninitiated. I find it hard to understand the value of a lot of IOT applications – do I really want to change the temperature of my home heating while I’m on the train going home? But one example did sound pretty useful for a manufacturer of white good.

I bet your washing machine has about a dozen wash programmes and I also wager that you have never used most of them. So why do they exist? Because somebody thinks somebody uses them and it looks impressive on the marketing material. The IOT example in the conference suggested that every time somebody starts a wash the machine should send a message to the cloud indicating which programme was being used, so that half of the buttons can be removed when version 2 of the machine is designed.

So should I add instrumentation like this to my software, so that I can remove some of the Edit options?

As it happens my software already has instrumentation – every call to the server is logged in the database so that we can see which functions are used more than others and more importantly we can see which ones perform badly i.e. slowly. However, it doesn’t matter how you select Edit on the UI it always logs that the same edit function has been executed on the server.

It’s given me something to think about but like most people I think I’ll continue to over engineer my software in the hope that each extra option I add will attract or please at least one of my users.