Monday, May 7, 2018

An Easy Way to Enforce User Recognition in Software

Every web application consists of two parts - (1) what the user sees, and responds to, and (2) all the processing that goes on in the Server, somewhere on the Internet, in response to the User's input.

The server side is usually divided into a part that interfaces with a Database - and a Controller, that decides what happens next (often called the Business Logic). This is often referred to as the MVC (Model, View, Controller) pattern. Messages flow between all these components, to keep them coordinated with each other.

All too often. the user (and his needs) are ignored by the companies who write the software everyone uses. They assume the user exists to serve them - and not the other way around.

In my opinion, this is not a desirable situation - and should be changed, to make the user more important.

This can be done easily, by including a button on everything the User sees, asking "Are you having a problem with this?" If the user responds, he must be given a response number, and the promise that the company is working on this problem.

But to make this really work, these problems must also be listed in a public database, that everyone can view. This information can be searched by other programs, to show what companies are responding to their user inputs - or anything else, that anyone wants to know.

The object here is transparency to make visible, information that is usually hidden.

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