that’s how I think the best tools evolve – out of some unmet need

My friend Michal recently wrote about “Software and change”:http://sabren.com/index.php?p=74, exploring the idea that:

Software that doesn’t result in a behaviour change has very little value.

I agree, with the caveat that software that forces behavioral change also has very little value. As an example, look at “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/, a ‘social bookmarking’ application that, despite its current audience of the technical elite, is “changing the way search giant Yahoo does business”:http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/.

The idea behind del.icio.us is simple: organize your bookmarks with tags instead of folders. In addition, share your bookmarks with others and gain the benefit of their organizational efforts.

If you’ve used a web browser, you probably know what bookmarks or favorites are. Before del.icio.us, I tended toquickly bookmark a site and later on organize my bookmarks into some meaningful heirarchy. Unfortunately, this meant I usually had at least one folder full of hundreds of unfiled bookmarks; causing much consternation whenever I needed to find a site in that list. Moreover, the organization process always took me quite a while to complete – especially when I got distracted in the middle by a bookmark I hadn’t used in a while.

Del.icio.us encouraged me to change that habit. Now, when I bookmark a page, I describe it with a few words that represent the page’s content, and later on I find it by any one or more of those key words. It eliminated my need to periodically clean up my ‘piles’ because I now could find anything in the pile no matter how big it was, as long as I remembered something of what the page was about.

But I’m still saving bookmarks; this evolutionary change improves my organization and saves me time and energy, but it’s not something I had to do, nor is del.icio.us so different that it’s a complete switch from what I was doing before.

On the other hand, I didn’t use the service heavily until Apple released Tiger and the Dashboard technology, and an enterprising young programmer “developed a simple utility”:http://protagonist.co.uk/dashLicious/ that makes saving a bookmark of a page to del.icio.us quick and easy. Another evolutionary change.

Now it’s poised to gain a much larger audience with Yahoo’s beta of ’My Web 2.0′.

Returning to Michal’s experiences, he writes about simple changes he made in several workflows that he believes significantly streamlined and improved company’s processes. Most of them involve changes that – for one reason or another – are common sense to technical people and unimaginable to non-techies. But they built on the technology already available while at the same time meeting a need or eliminating an inefficiency.

Sometimes, people didn’t even consciously realize how inefficient their processes were until Michal made that simple change. They might have felt frustration or disliked the methods they used, but since they didn’t know any better way of doing it, their method couldn’t be at fault.

I performed the same sort of work in several of my jobs, creating development guidelines to streamline both the production and maintenance aspects of building web presences. These ranged from file naming to site structure to version control methods to css and html coding standards – again using technology then available, even if quite new (the companies I worked for, as a result of my efforts, were almost all early-adopters of CSS and web standards-based development).

Part of this was out of my own need. I wanted to spend less time dealing with the differences between projects when we could recycle our efforts, and more time dealing with the differences between projects when our clients’ needs required unique solutions. I wanted to spend two hours, not two days, updating a 300-page site. I wanted to focus my energy on creating a presence for our clients. Those days, anybody could build a web site, even the client’s boss’s cousin Dubya. (Yeah, that’s a joke. But there was a lot of that going around when the web first got big)

And that’s how I think the best tools evolve – out of some unmet need. Almost all of my current and upcoming projects base on some area of my life where I feel I’d be happier, less stressed, more productive, you name it, if only I had something that did “this”. But (and I suspect I’ve had the same experiences as Michal here), there seem to be levels of “this”:

• Replicating a process with minor efficiency improvements
• Creating a new process to replace an inefficient old process
• Evolving an inefficient process into something more X

For a while I spent time doing the first. When I was competing in the Body for Life challenge, I wrote most of a workout tracking application – well, it was much more than just tracking – but finally realized that just using the printed out charts they provided worked quite well for me. The only inefficiencies in the whole process were that I had to sometimes type information into my challenge blog, duplicating what I wrote on the paper, and that oftentimes I forgot to bring the sheet. Had I finished and really used the challenge tracking application, however, the whole process would have become more complicated and inefficient.

When an old process completely breaks down, creating a new process is often the path chosen. However, brand new processes generally require massive shifts in work styles and workflows, and as a result suffer from slow, low adoption rates. This is exactly the reason Macromedia tries to get the Flash plugin embedded or pre-installed with the browser instead of forcing users to install it themselves.

My focus now is on that evolutionary change – the integration of different technology, different methods, different ideas in order to evolve processes… While I was driving home today, I realized just how quickly I can adapt from one car’s dashboard and controls to another; there is value in patterns, value in existing methods. Breaking the mold entirely often causes more damage than one might realize.

So that’s my advice: Develop for your needs, and don’t reinvent the wheel. Improve it. That’s where the real revolutions lie.