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I’m all for agile development and iterative deployment. I just wish Microsoft would recognise that many of our end users are resistant to learning new computer skills.

One of my tasks, amongst numerous others, is training non-technical teams how to create and maintain content on SharePoint.

Sounds easy, but you’d be surprised. These are generally nurses, psychologists, therapists, and occasionally junior administrators, known for utilising technology only grudgingly.

So it’s a bit of a pain to return from annual leave and discover that Microsoft’s developers have deployed changes that significantly modify SharePoint’s user interface.

For me: no big deal. This is my bread and butter, and I can easily adapt to change. But for our users, including those in my own team, less so.

Remotely deploying a raft of changes to server farms is the easy part. Updating the learning of busy clinical teams is something else entirely. That’s why we prefer interative change over great leaps forward.

The onus for delivering guidance doesn’t fall on Microsoft, of course. No, it falls on the ever-so patient chap so well practised at teaching at the user’s level, which is a very low level indeed.

Whatever happened to “understand users and their needs”? This is not user centric design as we know it. The user interface itself may be an improvement over what went before. The issue is that users operate in a context, which rapid deployment completely ignores.