Of course, I have no problem with them providing the option to conduct transactions in Spanish. What bothered me was that I had to tell them every time I used the ATM. Christ, they know who I am; I just put my card in the machine, and they’re addressing me by name! What are the odds I would want to change my mind and use a different language than I used last time I used the ATM? Would that ever happen?

Now, there may have been a technical reason that it wasn’t possible to save my preferred language. From a user’s perspective, though, it just doesn’t matter. It’s annoying having to answer the same question, click the same button, change the same radio button, or do anything else every single time you want to get something done.

I try to remember how irritating those ATMs were when I’m adding new functionality in Mockery. Am I asking my users to do the same thing over and over? Users tend to be less forgiving of minor annoyances when your application doesn’t spit out $20 bills.

Most times when I mention this to people they ask me why I didn’t just learn to play right-handed. After all, it would be my left hand that would be doing the “hard” part. And, in fact, I tried it when I was first starting. Thing was, it just felt wrong. I didn’t enjoy it until I flipped the guitar over and played it the way it felt right. Years later, I’m still happily shredding.

The suggestion to “just play right-handed” is well-meaning but wrong. There is a reason that right-handed people (almost) universally play guitar right-handed. There is a real connection between plucking and strumming and the dominant hand. It just works that way for most people. Fighting to overcome that natural tendency is not fun, and when playing music is not fun people do not learn to play. I think you’d be doing a disservice to an aspiring guitarist if you told him or her to flip the guitar over and play it the other way because that’s just the way it’s done.

Software, I think, is a lot like that. You can force people to try to accommodate your interface. If your app is important enough to them, they may even fight their way through the pain and continue to use it. But if you continually tell people to do things in a way that is uncomfortable and unintuitive for them, people who are just getting started are going to bail out and give up on you because it’s not worth the pain to them. If I ever get tempted to cut a corner UI-wise, I’m going to try to remember how it felt to try to play that right-handed guitar 15-odd years ago when I was getting started.