Andrei, I totally agree 3 to 50 is a bad ratio, but it can work in a practical, not necessarily optimal way:
First of all everything has to be caveated by "it depends...", what are you building, what are the dynamics of the solution, what are the designers responsibilities, what other teams can be leveraged. In my case, (which is actually more than 50 devs to 3, or I should say 3 1/2 designers, as we have a part time visual designer), the backend engineers have 3 entirely different systems they have to interface our application with, which causes factoral levels of effort compared to an enclosed/single system. As well we leverage training/help desk and support for feedback and testing, and via a "Feature Driven Design Process", SME's are invovled with every design decision. We design pattern libraries and templates, then follow/leverage these in design. With good task flows/scenarios/requirements building out screens can be done very rapidly. So it is doable, but we could use another 5 to 10 people given our focus expanded to "own" responsibilities, which we are presently leveraging other teams for. Andrei wrote: I can't imagine how a team of 3 designers can practically work with a team of 50 engineers. It would either the designers are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what needs to spec'd and designed, or the engineers are sitting around creating their own design if there is a lack of work spec'd out, or both. -- Joseph Rich Rogan President UX/UI Inc. http://www.jrrogan.com ________________________________________________________________ *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
