Perception is reality

I know I’ve harped on this in years gone by, but it needs to be top of mind for developers: Perception is reality.

That is, it doesn’t matter what your app really is/does – all that matters is what your customer thinks your app is/does. That’s why a buggy, semi functional, but awesome looking application can often get the sale (or user acceptance) over a solid, does-the-job, but awful looking application. Take the iPhone for example :-) (Jokes, people, jokes – don’t flame me).

Seriously though, the perception people get from using an app or service is sooo important.

I was reminded of this when reading the Engineering Windows 7 blog recently. Take Steven’s comment about the perception of UI speed in this post:

“I remember when I was writing a portion of the Windows UI for Visual C++ and when I benchmarked against Borland C++ at the time, we were definitely faster (measured by seconds). However the reviews consistently mentioned Borland as being faster and providing feedback in the form of counts of lines compiled flying by. So I coded up a line count display that flashed a lot of numbers at you while compiling (literally flashy so it looked like it couldn’t keep up). In clock times it actually consumed a non-zero amount of time so we got "slower" but the reviewers then started giving us credit for being faster. So in this case slower actually got faster.”

As a developer – yes, even the ‘I just code the database stuff’ amongst us, need to understand this.