Ali, I sympathize. What Jay recommends is excellent advice for grappling with any overly strong and unreflective group, but there are more specific approaches that work best with engineers and similar personality types. Occasionally there are even advantages in having such a group.
There are two issues with engineer-driven environments. - *Persuasion.* Building relationships and a business case is helpful. Focus on using data that appeals to the scientific part of their brains. Their logic and vanity will both appreciate that. I find any relevant neuroscience data very helpful, as well as analysis that incorporates different user types, including their type. So, have a smart engineer persona and what works for them (probably what they're recommending), and then explain the other types and needs, and how your approach meets them all. - *Development style. * More and more engineering-driven places are using Agile and Agile-esque approaches such as Scrum for development. This can make it challenging to meet big-picture needs such as UX & IA. It is indeed possible, however. First, establish public best practices and "what works" tips, and where possible train all teams in the basics. Second, establish UX as part of an integration team, and let them track all the separate project streams in one place, to see overlap and conflict. Lastly - and this isn't necessary, it just helps me personally - remember that Agile & Scrum are basically the creative process writ large, applied to technical development. The very act of working this way makes engineers and developers more accessible to alternative approaches - and makes the design people more immediately aware of dev needs, too. I said it could help at times, too. I worked at Texas Instruments for a while, and it's a very engineer-driven environment. However, the audience was just over 80% engineer as well. So we could turn to our own engineers as well as user engineers for research and testing, and happily design primarily *to* engineers, which is a rare joy in UX. The focus is clear and there's very little confusion as to what works and what doesn't, although there are a few differences with the rest of the world. (For example, for something like training informaiton, engineers prefer one long page that's well-anchored internally, rather than multiple pages to keep most content above the fold.) So, those are my comments on dealing with the engineering mind set. Hope they're useful to you! bests, Alex O'Neal ux manager/social network analyst -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. ________________________________________________________________ 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
