To illustrate how awkward it is these days to do something simple… we needed to disable a button, but it’s not clear to the user why the button is disabled. I quickly put a tooltip on the control.
I knew we needed approval from the UX team who are responsible for the “User Experience”, so I emailed them.
When our Product Owner was told, she was really annoyed and started moaning that I made a decision behind her back.
A decision hadn’t really been made, I was just exploring one simple option and trying to get things done. There was always the chance that UX wouldn’t agree with it, but it’s given them context and a possible solution.
The Product Owner didn’t like the tooltip at all. I did point out that other areas of the system do disable the button but don’t show a tooltip. So my button is an improvement that we show a tooltip – at least the users know why the button is disabled.
I suppose showing a tooltip for this disabled button is inconsistent UX, but that’s why I emailed the UX team. I know UX Team tend to hate “dynamic” UIs so don’t like things appearing/disappearing. This isn’t something we are removing, but just disabling/enabling.
After the Product Owner contacted UX, they wanted me to basically redo the dialog because other aspects don’t conform to their standards, but all that functionality has been around for years.
The bug/enhancement wasn’t actually reported by our users. It was just a Developer who decided it would be beneficial to change.
Conclusion
When there’s many people in charge of deciding what work needs to get done, and many people in charge of how things get implemented; making any change is a slow process and most things end up getting thrown on the backlog because the effort of implementing anything increases.
Stranger Coding Tings 