Hi Joseph,

On 9 Oct 2007, at 17:38, Joseph Selbie wrote:

> We have a brilliant display coder on our team. He rocks when it  
> comes to
> pushing the edge in AJAX type projects. He understands how his code  
> will
> need to be implemented and is often helping our client's  
> programming teams
> make better use of their environment.
>
> He's also a really good IX designer. He doesn't let his knowledge  
> of the
> underlying code push him into doing things the easy way. He stays  
> focused on
> the needs of the users.
>
> He is rare is my experience.

They're becoming less rare as time goes on (in my experience anyway).  
It also depends where you look (e.g. I find developers on the Mac  
platform generally have more UX skills than those on Windows).

> However, in practical terms, we use him mostly for coding because  
> there is
> just so much to do. We have other very talented IX designers on our  
> team, we
> don't have other people with his brilliance in the code.
>
> So, I would tend say that the two roles can coexist in one person
> temperament wise and skill wise -- but there just isn't enough time on
> projects for a person to do both.

That depends on the project, the people and the skills they have ;-)

Even when somebody with developer-ix skills is primarily in the  
developer role I find them very useful since they are much more  
capable of dealing with inevitable changes during product development  
in an appropriate way (even if it's just "hey - this new fribble just  
sucks for the end-user. Please fix it." :-)

I've found if I can get the whole team with some UX knowledge, even  
if you have to spend some time to put it there first, it makes  
development as a whole a vastly better process. It frees you up to  
deal with the hard problems that really need an expert.

Cheers,

Adrian
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