I'm an in-house designer who sits on the same floor as the development team, doing a lot of enterprise system work. It's good to find that groove that works with your developers (for us, nothing gets results like a clickable HTML/CSS prototype, accompanied by an MSWord doc with screenshots of the different error screens...all meticulously dated so no one accidentally designs to the wrong version), but be warned: sometimes you can get so wrapped up in how you & the developers communicate that you forget your end user. In the past, if an interface needed a fix, because I wanted to keep confrontations to a minimum I would unconsciously design a solution that stayed within the programmers' comfort zone. (This happened during a project last year, and the end users spanked me for it.) Looking back I know now there were times when - for a truly usable solution - I should have been more of a hard-ass.
This isn't necessarily true for other settings, but for large-scale enterprise apps, I would venture that the quality of the deliverables you give to your developers is informed by the quality of the deliverables you have with your end users. If all you've got are a couple hour's worth of user interviews (which often turn into rant sessions and pie-in-the-sky wish lists) and some Photoshop mockups, it won't matter how well you communicate with the developers, you're not going to get the biggest bang for your buck. I think every company has its own "thing" that works for them, discovered by trial and error. But now that I've figured out how to communicate with my development team, I'm more free to focus on creating research deliverables that...(wait for it) feed into the deliverables that go to the development team. -G ________________________________________________________________ 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
