In the previous two posts I have discussed the usage of version numbers and what my experience and view on them us from a developer’s point of view. Since I am also a user of software, I think it is just fair to also give you my experience and opinion of version numbers as a user. To what level my background as a software developer influences this unconscionably I will leave up to you to decide.
A first and simple questions would already be whether it even makes sense to make a version number visible to a user. Why would a user care on which version he is on? I can only come up with two reasons:
- Allow the user to specify the version of his application in case he is asking for support.
- Let the user know/decide whether he needs to update.
In my experience I don’t believe a lot of users actually contact support or create issues (except when they paid for the software). They either just accept the issues, or look for some other piece of software that does the same thing. Personally I try to report bugs that I encounter but only for applications I have been using (and like using) for some time.
For the case of upgrading, I must admit I have a few different ‘types’ of applications when it comes to upgrade routine.
On my Windows 10, I don’t care about the exact version. All I care is whether there are updates or not. Mostly because I want my windows to be updated at all times. Well, with my current settings I can’t even ignore most of the windows updates and I must install them whenever they are available.
But then there are other applications which I don’t update at all! Some of these applications point out to me there is a new version and sometimes I want to update, but then they just redirect me to a download page, at which point I just give up as it is too much work. If the application does not mention there are updates available, I simply don’t update at all. I’m not going to spend time checking whether there are updates available.
In none of these cases the existence of version numbers is very helpful. Either I don’t care about them because the updates happen automatically, or I don’t update no matter which new version is available.
But sometimes, when I encounter a problem, or see something weird, I do look it up online. At that point it is interesting to know what your version number is. To both know whether the mentioned problem could apply to my version, and whether a potential fix could work. As well as figuring out whether or not to update in case they mention a newer version with a fix for it.
I guess we can conclude that the existence of version numbers for me as a user is not very useful unless real problems occur. This means that the version number should not be too visible for the user.
Working As A Software Engineer 