User research tales unveil surprising software usage. Joel Spolsky's captivating blog post reveals that Excel, assumed to be a calculation tool, is primarily used for creating tables. Observing your users can lead to unexpected discoveries.
I always enjoy hearing user research stories, “from the field” accounts about people using software in unexpected ways, and teams confronting the diversity on display when encountering actual users in their own environment. No surprise then that I found this recent tidbit from Joel Spolsky’s blog, Joel on Software, to be great. The section below is an aside from a longer blogpost and I’ve excerpted a punchline here, but go read the whole thing, it is worth it.
…Everybody thought of Excel as a financial modeling application. It was used for creating calculation models with formulas and stuff…
…Round about 1993 a couple of us went on customer visits to see how people were using Excel…Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.” Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table.
…Spreadsheets are not just tools for doing “what-if” analysis. They provide a specific data structure: a table. Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recalc.
That story is a great illustration of the value in going out and observing the people who use your software. You may find something that changes the way you think about what you are building.
