One of the most salient features of our Tech Hiring culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.
What is an example of how an application can anticipate user behavior?
There are multiple ways to understand your question. Others have answered about things like pre-loading a likely user request. I will answer how you must be smart at understanding where the real pain points of your users are, and how you design your app around that projected user behavior.
I would say all applications try to anticipate user behavior. And definitely all applications should try to do it.
Exceptions are the ones that try to do everything for every possible use case, famous examples including Microsft Word, My Space, Sea Monkey, Emacs, $ git.
They inevitably end up having super confusing user workflows, but boy, they do check all the checkboxes.
Paul Buchheit, the original developer of Gmail, had a nice article a while ago
Copying the mistakes of a failed product isn't a great formula for success.
What's the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product -- the rest is noise.
For example, the original iPod was: 1) small enough to fit in your pocket, 2) had enough storage to hold many hours of music and 3) easy to sync with your Mac. That's it -- no wireless, no ability to edit playlists on the device, no support for Ogg -- nothing but the essentials, well executed.
We took a similar approach when launching Gmail: 1) it was fast, 2) stored all of your email (back when 4MB quotas were the norm), and 3) had an innovative interface based on conversations and search. The secondary and tertiary features were minimal or absent.
Having to define those there attributes forces you to have a great understanding of your user needs, and to have discussions with them to discover them.
Exercise left to the readers: what are the three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of DEV?
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There are multiple ways to understand your question. Others have answered about things like pre-loading a likely user request. I will answer how you must be smart at understanding where the real pain points of your users are, and how you design your app around that projected user behavior.
I would say all applications try to anticipate user behavior. And definitely all applications should try to do it.
Exceptions are the ones that try to do everything for every possible use case, famous examples including Microsft Word, My Space, Sea Monkey, Emacs,
$ git.They inevitably end up having super confusing user workflows, but boy, they do check all the checkboxes.
Paul Buchheit, the original developer of Gmail, had a nice article a while ago
Paul Buchheit - If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good.
Having to define those there attributes forces you to have a great understanding of your user needs, and to have discussions with them to discover them.
Exercise left to the readers: what are the three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of DEV?