My teammate and I have been dutifully plugging away at our Job Tracker application. I have the database up and running. I have the tables fleshed out. I have buttons looking very nice with rounded corners and a pinch of color to make it easy on the eyes. But as I begin to add jobs to the database I am starting to wonder if I need all of these attributes. I have an attribute for description, salary, follow-up, follow-up due date, job added date, job status, skill requirements, company name, job title…and it goes on and on. Do I need all of these?
I am at a point now where I think to myself … I should have probably created more use cases. Instead, I created a wish list of information without thinking to myself how badly do I need it? How useful will I find it? If I have one hundred jobs to track, will I want to read paragraphs and long lists for each job? Will I avoid entering jobs if there are over 10 fields to enter, even if voluntary?
I think a lot of database designers and programmers run across this problem of including too much. We don’t want to leave anything out because…what if they need it? But we also don’t want the user to find the app burdensome or overwhelming. There is usually a happy medium of enough information for the user to find the application helpful but not so much it sends them running for the hills.
In my next sprint I plan to rethink some of the attributes. I might consider removing…well I can’t think of anything right now because I find them all essential, but surely I will find something. I hope!
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