Software Updates and How It’s Done Wrong

To understand why software upating is broken one must first look at how we use software. Roughly speaking, things go like this:

1. We set out to achieve a goal or perform a task when we start an application. This might be a trivial goal, an unconscious goal or something more serious.
2. Then, once the software is running, we start trying to achieve these set goals.
3. Once the goal has been achieved we either continue with a second goal using the same software (step 2) Or
4. Close down the application and move on to something entirely different.

So, where does updating fit in between these stages? Clearly, when we are at step 1, updating an application isn’t a priority. During step 2, we are also not really interested in updating, even less so than during step 1. At step 3, once a task is completed, the likelihood of wanting to update is rising although it might be that we still want to continue using the application to achieve different goals. Only when we reach step 4 we might want to update. You see, updating software is not something we like to do, it is something that we inevitably have to do. It doesn’t fit in with the way we use computers. So when have finished our goals and want to move on to something else we suddenly stop caring about what the application does, until we start again at step 1.

So how does updating happen in the wild? Are these stages taken into account? Some examples:

Flock
Flock downloads the update somewhere between step 2 or 3. Once the file has been downloaded we are forced by the browser to go back to step 1 in order to complete the update. A better approach would have been to let the update download and once the “close” button is pressed perform the actual install.

TextWrangler
TextWrangler notifies you of an update between step 1 and 2. This is the worst kind of update, short of not notifying at all. It completely breaks flow and forces the user into a different step. The alternative? Notify the user of the update at the end of the session.

OS X Leopard
Apple has a surprisingly bad approach to updating. It depends on the type of update, but usually somewhere between step 1 and 3 the user gets notified of an update. Subsequently it forces us into going to step 4, restart and update the computer. How could we remedy this? Once again, the key is to know when it is appropriate to update. Usually, in the case of OS updates, files are quite big so downloading them might take a while. One could start out by downloading the update automatically somewhere between step 1 and 3. Once step 4 has been reached (in this case shutting the computer down) the actual install could take place.

In my experience very few applications do actually approach updates in a very user friendly way. Has anyone seen any really good examples?