Layability, a lesser known software metric
»From the manifesto and programming part of the brain.
It has come to my attention that the good folks over at the SEI forgot one important software metric.
From jwz’s ”Groupware Bad”
So I [jwz] said, narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it’s not only crude but insightful. ”How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).
“Social software” is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.
From a recent Newsweek Q&A with Steve Jobs, ”Good for the Soul”
Newsweek: Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?
Steve Jobs: In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.
From a Slashdot comment
Of course, I mention that I know BASIC. Next night, we’re at my apartment, using my room mate’s TI Silent 700 to log into the Wellsley PDP/11 (Simmons didn’t have their own computer) via its acoustic coupler and the phone’s handset. I check her work, fix a few mistakes, and run her program. Looking over the results, printed out on that thin thermal paper, our eyes meet…
Yeah, BASIC got me laid. Perl, not so much.
Layability: A runtime quality of the system which describes the ease at which the end user can get laid. Not to be confused with Interoperability.