Praise and working paradox
It’s a bit of a paradox that things that work well we never notice in life. You’d think the things that ‘just worked’ would be hailed as wonderful and supreme, yet as human’s we have this nasty habit of ignoring the silent working. Think about the last time you weren’t complacent about something that worked all the time and noted that it was doing a great job? More often than not we are focused on the things that don’t work. The things that claim to do one thing on the tin and fail to live up to anything apart from much ranting.
Bug focus
The same can be said for a website, when it just works it tends to get ignored. In development you are focused on the bugs, the things that don’t work. Life becomes ‘bugcentric’ as you work on the failings and accept the things that do what they are meant to. Of course, on first working it’s all praise and hoorah, this soon fades as the bugs become the stars of the show and point of focus. The same can be said for anything not in development. Once it’s launched the bugs are the things that can kill any project. Sure it may do 95% of things amazingly easy and well – bet you the focus is that 5% bug for the users.
Silently working
One of the goals of design or development is to get this unsung hero that ‘just works’. It’s odd in a sense that the focus is more on what doesn’t work than what does. Yes, on release the client will praise what has been done if it works. We seem to have a time lapse on this praise though as things continue to work and all goes quiet. It will be more successful because of ‘just working’ but in turn it can be brought to it’s knees with a killer bug – that 1% can certainly make or break. Credit is such a weird thing in that sense. Users are all to quick to point out the bug (s) that bring the site into disregard, yet ignore the 20 other actions they did prior to this that worked like a dream. Next time you use something that ‘just works’ maybe take a minute to notice it is actually working.
You are definitely right. It lies deep in the brain to evolve, making things better, correct bugs and faults and dismiss the things that work, the things that are in the right place. Just like our brain filters the things we have seen – to concentrate on new ones, we notice the ‘moving objects’ more quickly than the nicely set ones – that’s how we survived some thousand years ago and became the dominant race on this planet (if that’s good or not I don’t know :-)
I agree it’s potentially evolutional, I think some of the filtering could be in society the amount of ‘noise’ though and a having to survive which also plays back to evolution. I am also not sure if us being dominant is a great thing ;)