In the hubbub of development schedules, I am sometimes given the opportunity to correct design errors. Three different situations come to mind:
1. It's a little thing that I can sneak in while fixing something else. For example, an application skin I recently worked on had a great deal of text embedded in button and control graphics, hindering localization. "Make it look better" was the request, but I worked with the engineer who built the skin harness to move all the text into resource files, then created a symbol set for the display graphics and added localizable tooltips. Didn't take much longer, looks way better, and gives them something they can sell abroad. 2. The design problem is a genuine bug that's keeping people from being successful, like those you mention, Bryan. In my experience, these are often little tweaks. Engineers and QA may report them as often as customers do. These are great because they get on the development schedule and you don't need to champion them. 3. The entire product is so flawed that nobody uses it, or it frustrates everyone but the most senior engineers who built it, and the entire business team recognizes that a redesign is needed. It's sad how many of these there are, created in the "1. Build, 2. Ship, 3. Test in the Field, 4. Design" school of development. Probably the bread and butter of a lot of us. Michael Micheletti On Dec 3, 2007 5:32 PM, Bryan Minihan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I agree with your argument, but actually think you and the software > designer > to whom you spoke are both right. It could be you both had semantic > differences in what constitutes a "design problem". To some folks (many > developers I know), a "design problem" includes: widgets in the wrong > place, fonts that are too small, colors that don't contrast, distorted > graphics. When you tell them a "design problem" that's worth fixing is: > the registration form has 17 steps too many, the site doesn't flow > correctly, the WYSIWYG editor introduces conflicting tags into the page, > which make the link colors inconsistent...those folks are likely to say: > "Ohhhh....THAT design problem! That's different." And then they're > likely > to say those should be accounted for in the requirements, up front. > ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
