Products and Services

The "average dumb user" review service

It can take years for a software author to find and fix the kind of problems that the average user runs into on a daily basis.

Meanwhile, potential customers download the software, discover a problem, and uninstall. Yet another sale lost.

It is rare that a potential customer goes to the trouble of informing the software author. Indeed, this is such a rare event that such people should be cherished, even rewarded, and certainly not treated as a right pain.

So, I offer my services to programmers who prefer to not have their customers find the faults for them. I will do it instead. For a fee, naturally. I'm not that dumb.

I do the dumb user thing really, really well. Most people would be embarrassed to make such an admission. I, on the other hand, see it as an asset that I can make a living on.

Here's a recent example: while testing some software, I wanted to make the text larger, so I did what we all do - hold down the Ctrl key while rotating the mouse wheel. We all do this, many times a day, don't we?

Apparently not the author of this software. Oh yes, the text did resize all right. No problem there. But... the original-size text remained visible. So now I had the identical text twice, at two different sizes, superimposed.

I emailed the author. He replied that he had never thought of doing what I had done. Right. If he had, he would have seen the problem and fixed it, rather than leave it for his customers to find. Or worse, leave it for his potential customers to find, and then move on to someone else's program. Another sale gone...