One interesting story about Chinese software development

I have once seen an interesting complaint written by one foreigner about Beijing South Railway Station (China) on foursquare. It says: "There is simply no way to buy a ticket at the machine unless you have a Chinese ID. What the hell they have English interface for then?"

 

Apparently,the foreigner cannot buy ticket because he doesn’t have Chinese ID but there still presents an English interface for foreigners on the vending machine. Because of my profession, I find this awkward situation worth discussion. The complaint from foreign friends poses a typical question for Chinese software developers. Beautiful original intention of the designer has become worthless to the user, which no developer would like to see.Think about it, during the design of the automatic ticket vending machine, they wanted the software to be more international considering potential users from different background, but overlooked the administrative restriction for foreigners from Chinese government. What a disappointment it is for foreign friends still cannot buy a ticket after eagerly entering the English interface.

 

In fact, such a thing happens everywhere in life, not confined to the internationalization support. More often than not, a simple product could look complicated from user perspective, as with the case of domestic supplies. Simply speaking, the user feels that some product description is too technical to appeal to all user groups. Functions are not well ordered for ease operation. Re-look at the story of the South Station ticket vending machines; comparing Chinese software products with Microsoft and imported goods, the gap is obvious. Microsoft considers user experience as the most important part of the software development. They pay high attention to even tiny hints. Why do Microsoft's office products dominate the market across globe?Not just an early start, they are concerned more of a user. 

 

Excellence and ordinary is just a step away. 99 and 0 are the same to some extent. We should maintain a high standard of doing things. This height enables us to see further and delicate minds to produce more sophisticated software. All participants should consider products seriously as their career with full dedication. Such case as ticket vending machines, I can only say that we developed the habit of leaving tails after so many projects,leaving them to teams of later stage.

The devil is in the details.

Note : this article is translated from this article : http://blog.csdn.net/lfsfxy9/article/details/7376393 .the original author is lfsfxy9