On Sun, 2004-10-24 at 19:11, Ken Boucher wrote:
>
> If I'm going to do GUI work I need more experience than doing part
> time GUI work is going to provide. I also need to be in a GUI mindset.
> I need to think about things differently. There's a lot of things I
> need to keep in mind when doing GUI work, and if I approach GUI
> work with a model frame of mind I find I'm not thinking about all the
> right things.
Interesting. My experience is pretty much the opposite. What I'm
producing is a whole product, so I like to keep the whole product in
mind as much as possible.
How do others feel about this? We all have our specialties, of course,
but how much do you folks try to focus on one layer of the thing you're
making?
> Some people have said that the usability expert is part of the
> customer team. I don''t agree with that. A lot of our programmers
> have business knowledge and we find that knowledge very important.
> In fact I'd say that teaming programmers with no smalltalk experience
> but lots of domain experience with experienced smalltalkers with no
> domain experience has produced great results. If I was doing web
> GUI work, having an experienced web page designer learning a
> programming language pairing with a language expert interested in
> learning web technology, graphics, and usability would be a great
> combination.
This is true, and it's very nice when you can work that way. But the
problem with this theory is that many usability experts don't write code
at all, and aren't interested in learning. Many very good web UI
designers stop at doing the HTML. Further, a usability expert needs to
spend a lot of time doing the same thing the rest of the customer team
does, which is getting data from end users. And at least on the projects
I've been on, the actual designing of the UI takes a relatively small
portion of time spent on construction.
So putting the UI expert on the customer team is working very well for
my team on a current project. The UI expert hands us mockups; we pepper
him with questions as we go. Since we only have one UI designer, I think
having him pair would a) annoy him by making him spend time on things he
doesn't care about, and b) introduce a bottleneck that doesn't exist in
our current process.
An interesting set of papers about this was written by Virginia Belotti,
Ian Smith, and others at PARC. There, UI researchers acted as the
customer, developing an email app. For them, having UI experts as the
customer worked very well. I can't find public copies of these papers,
but here's the link and abstract on the ACM site:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=778740
William
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