A while ago we went grocery shopping at a different shop than our usual place. It’s surprising how we get used to a specific customer experience.

Long story short, we were confronted with rules that seemed illogical in the purchasing of apples. It made our experience at this store negative, and we are very unlikely to shop there again.

A few days later, we bought more apples from our regular store, and the experience seemed even better, because of the frustration we experienced at the other store.

Which apples do you think were eaten first?

We kept looking at the “apples of frustration” and just didn’t want to eat them. The apples themselves were fine, but the memory of buying them was so negative that it spilled on the product.

In the end, we ate those apples, but not before all the other options were exhausted.

Do you want to be that choice?

How people interact with you influences how they see your product. If their experience with your organization is good, they will see your product favorably, maybe even better than […]

I tried to print a fax today. In Windows Vista’s Picture Viewer.

No can do. Vista sees my .tif file as an image, and tries to print is in landscape orientation. There was nothing I could do to change it. This highly aggravated. Vista was getting in the way of getting things done, a big no-no for tools – tools should help you get things done, not prevent you from that.

I turned to Vista’s help with no luck, and googled my problem. Lo an behold, I found several forum threads on that very subject.

The solution: download a fax viewer that works.

I am so irritated that I will download the software. If I could entirely replace Vista’s picture viewer feature, I would.

Don’t be like Vista. Don’t get in the way of your client’s work.

As AceProject grows, it takes longer to put out a new version. There is more to test, the documentation takes longer to be finished, and debugging is a growing monster.

Typical of waterfall development methods.

Daniel, our president, was tired of this. He wanted us to be able to release versions faster, more efficiently. Instead of having a release-based development cycle, we’ll have a feature-base development cycle. This means when a feature is out of the initial development phase, it will go straight to testing, documentation and debugging. It’s going to be easier to test just the one feature and its implications. It’s going to be faster to write documentation for just one feature at a time. It’s going to be a lot easier for developers to debug the feature they just developed, because it’s fresh in their minds.

On another level, it’s going to create one big team of the developers, testers and writer. Instead of the technical writer waiting for development to be done to start working, he will be working with them, as they develop […]

This fall is exceptionnally lively, politically speaking. There are elections both in the USA and in Canada. While in the USA there are only two political parties, in Canada there are five major political parties:

• The conservatives
• The liberals
• The socialists
• The greens
• A regional party that represents the interests of the Quebec province

That means 5 political programs. Five documents any elector should read before making a decision. That’s a lot of information!

This situation is an excellent example people making decisions based on their intuition instead of facts. Of course, there are some facts involved – the facts we read or hear about in the news or on political advertisements. But on voting day, it will all come down to guts: how we feel about the candidates, about the parties, and who we trust most.

The truth is, we could make a complicated comparative chart of all five parties’ programs and study it carefully, in the voting booth we would still choose with our gut.