Online software should be easy to use. Search forms and resultsets should behave as expected, links should be situated exactly where the user expects them to be, and use terms that users expect, not local jargon that takes time to learn.

MooseTrout prides itself on its high standards of laziness. We believe that online software should make the most complicated task seem trivial.

However, many online applications can make the most trivial task seem complicated. Extra clicks, strange navigation paradigms, local jargon. "Cool" or the latest technology for its own sake. Yuck.

MooseTrout -- working hard so your online users won't need to.

While this may seem obvious, software is built for the end user, not for the developer. (Unless that developer happens to be the end user as well!)

While MooseTrout's experience is invaluable to provide a better application experience, it is, ultimately, the user that is the expert at what an application should do and how it should do it.

That's why MooseTrout is constantly building expertise with processes that concentrate on discovering and meeting users' needs, regardless of whether the user is a student, faculty member, administrator, or librarian -- achieving buy-in, requirements gathering, running effective pilots, bug reporting, monitoring and notification to ensure high levels of service.

MooseTrout's philosophy can be summarized as follows:

1. open really is best
2. software that's easy to use

As mentioned in my last blog post, when I attended the Vancouver conference I was excited by how efficient it was to locate like-minded individuals, and how easy it was to avoid "mailing list momentum". Unfortunately, with UWinnipeg's official go-live to faculty and students this week, I did *not* make the Breeze meeting that I had hoped to. Next time....