Building Developer Tools Your Coworkers Won't Hate (J on the Beach 2018)

It's easy to complain about bad tools. It's harder to write a great tool yourself. Once you step into the shoes of an internal tools developer, you realize that you're balancing feature requests and constraints from a dozen different teams and an entire universe of complexity behind what should be a simple UI. In this talk, we'll talk about how to gather information about your users' needs, how to balance between conflicting requirements, and ways you can fail to build a tool that your coworkers want to use.

Transcript

1. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 building developer tools your coworkers won't hate amy nguyen (@amyngyn) j on the beach | may 24, 2018
2. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 hello! • observability engineer at stripe • excited about user experience design and education for developer tools • @amyngyn • amynguyen.net
3. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 agenda • motivation • how to do user research • UX design principles ◦ command line tools ◦ data analysis tools ◦ build tools
4. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 why care? • bad UX causes incidents. incidents cost money. • bad UX wastes time. time costs money. • bad UX creates hostility. hostility costs money.
5. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 • talk to people ◦ one-on-one ◦ focus groups how to do user research
6. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 how to do user research • ask the right questions ◦ don't ask questions that confirm what you were expecting ◦ dig deep, don't accept the first answer
7. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 • communicate as you follow-up ◦ build trust ◦ confirm your solutions are the right solutions how to do user research
8. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 • talk to people • ask the right questions • communicate as you follow-up how to do user research
9. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 does anyone even know what that flag does? command line tools
10. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 preview as the default • if your tool makes critical changes to infrastructure, don't allow users to make those changes accidentally ./run-script --confirm
11. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 preview as the default • provide diffs of what will change
12. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 be consistent % man -h Usage: man [OPTION] [SECTION] PAGE… [...]
13. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 be consistent % less -h Value is required after -h (--max-back-scroll)
14. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 be consistent • match arguments to your other tools • match arguments to historical usage
15. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 don’t break existing tools • have integration tests for your internal tools • design with existing tools in mind cat ex.txt | grep hi | sort -r
16. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 command line tools should • be consistent • integrate with the rest of your tools • provide previews and diffs
17. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 everyday we stray further from unix philosophy • these ideas have been discussed for decades! ◦ rule of composition ◦ rule of modularity ◦ rule of least surprise
18. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 command line tool design • provide previews and diffs • be consistent • integrate with the rest of your tools • for more, read "The Art of Unix Programming" by Eric S. Raymond (or just read the Wikipedia article!)
19. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 does that data really mean what i think it means? data analysis tools
20. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 rapid testing • users need a REPL or other way of quickly validating ideas
21. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 discoverability • autocomplete • GUI or other menus for showing all the options
22. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 correctness • syntax errors and highlighting • explanations for syntax errors
23. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 explorability let me go back to the previous page don't lose my place if I refresh let me share URLs let me open in a new tab
24. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 data analysis tool design • rapid testing • discoverability • correctness • explorability
25. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 i don't know who broke the build because i don't know how to find the build build tools
26. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 navigation • anticipate the most common actions ◦ find my latest build ◦ locate failing output ◦ rebuild • autocomplete!!!
27. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 fail fast • if something is failing, don't wait to finish before showing the result to the user
28. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 helpful messages at the right time • remind users to lint and unit test before kicking off a long build process • suggest corrections for bad input
29. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 useful output
30. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 useful output
31. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 summary • communicate early and often with users • imagine the context in which users will use your tools • user experience and good design matters even for infrastructure tools
32. @amyngyn J on the Beach 2018 thanks!