On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 12:16 AM, Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > What would *you* do? >
Hi Martin, Offer to facilitate design/whiteboard sessions and volunteer to write the design specs. You've got writing gifts so this seems a natural extension. The dev team will be thankful because they typically love having specs but hate writing them. As part of the design and specification process, you can offer suggestions on interfaces. This works out especially well if you prepare two or three different versions of wireframes ahead of time as discussion aids. You'll never build the wireframes you bring the first time, or maybe even the third or fourth, but be thankful - those are the wrong solutions. You want to contribute your time to the design effort and help the team be successful. Listen to your developers and make sure that you're documenting information they'll use and not just something that fills in blanks on a form and gets ignored afterwards. Some designs you'll be able to get close by iterative refinement and an awareness of design patterns. You'll be able to detect many usability problems before build time if you schedule a day or two for testing a paper prototype using random people you grabbed walking down a hallway. If you can get a little budget for field studies to observe your existing users work with your software this will give you valuable perspective on their tasks and goals. It may be difficult to get permission and funding for this initially; keep asking. The main idea is to be a facilitator of design on the team. As you succeed with simple concrete tasks, like preparing specification documents, you can gradually expand your role. This will give you time to study and learn how to do new tasks ahead of time. Finally, if you're good with graphics, symbols, colors, visual design - offer to contribute to this part. Otherwise some Java programmer will do it all in the Gimp, underwhelm, and deliver code late. Hope this helps, Michael Micheletti ________________________________________________________________ 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
