In my first "real" post I want to write about a subject that I regard very highly and sadly enough sometimes considered out of the realm of a CTO, and that is UI (User interface) and UX (User Experience).
I believe that the user's experience while working with my application will ultimately determine its success just as much (or even more) as the actual performance of the application's main task (provided of course that the application works correctly).
A user's experience is made up mainly by the feeling that an application triggers within the user and so my main task when creating an application (once its basic functionality works) is to create that feeling which will open up the user to embrace the application and accept it and its possible faults. This is particularly true with new applications mainly by startup companies as these applications are sure to have many faults in them and it is very important to have the criticism of these faults made in a productive and constructive manner rather then in a "bitchy" way, since this initial criticism is so very extremely important to the success of any venture.
I have encountered during my professional life as an applications developer and manager so many applications whose only faults were bad (or actually not good enough) user experience and almost all of them failed whereas applications with many faults to begin with, but which were able to inspire the right feelings, were successful because they were given feedback and criticism but were also given a chance to correct.
So if you are about to develop a new application/website/feature, make sure you inspire the right feelings even for the price of one or two features.
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