Talvin Muircastle creates assistive technologies for users with disabilities,  for the virtual world of Second Life.  The text below is adapted from (with permission) and you can read the entirety of his original post at his blog The ScriptAble Project.

You walk into a casino and put some money in the slot machine.  You pull the handle.  Odds are, you aren’t going to get anything the first time.  Probably not the second, or the third.  But casinos know that there is a window of opportunity for them: if you don’t see something line up in front of you, if you don’t hear the ring of coins or chips dropping into the till within a certain span of time, you are going to walk away.  They set the odds, therefore, such that within that window of opportunity you probably will get a payout of some amount.

Probably not the Jackpot.

More than likely, not even as much as you have put in.

Still, you have to get some measure of satisfaction and gratification from it, or eventually even the Gambling Addicts are going to walk away–or at least try a different game.  The level of payout required is determined, not via any intellectual mathematics, but through a sort of emotional calculus that varies person-to-person.

The same theory applies to developing technology for the End-User: if the User starts using your tech and doesn’t get some sense of satisfaction from it fairly quickly, they will decide it is not worth their valuable time.  They will view it as “broken”, and they will describe it as such to others.  Given that word-of-mouth is still the most potent form of advertising, this can make or break you.

Microsoft learned this the hard way with Windows Vista.  They thought that people not only would not, but could not go back to XP.  They did, in droves.  Apple recognized this when they released Snow Leopard: while Snow Leopard contains some important stuff for the future of Macs, it’s all under the hood.  The average user isn’t going to see much of a “payout”, so they priced it really low: $29.

Now add the challenges of Assistive Technology.  Most Software Development (sadly) assumes the hypothetical “Normal Person” as the audience.  This person doesn’t really exist, of course.  We are too diverse.  Perhaps we need to reconsider that whole concept, but that is a post for another time, and probably another blog.

My audience is almost never going to fit the “Normal Person” characteristics.  The End-User may not use their eyes.  They may not use–or even have!–hands.  They may have a high level of intelligence yet have difficulty communicating with me effectively due to dysfunction in one part of their brain.  They may have a disability “just like” someone else’s, and yet live their lives and deal with the world in a totally different way.  It is my job to create technology that will give them a “payout” in their first hour using it.  Sometimes, I even succeed.

The moral of this story?  IT students should be sure to get a good liberal arts education.  OK, seriously: the code you write may look elegant, efficient, and useful–to another scripter.  How does it work for the End-User? If they don’t start getting some coins in their till pretty quickly, they are going to stop pulling the handle, and you wasted a lot of time on a work of modern art.