On Jan 25, 2009, at 7:41 PM, gavin burke|FAW wrote:
You have to understand also the engineers perspective. From their
perspective they are the most important part of the process, without
them there would be no product just fresh air.
[...]
My advice is to wait around, cut your teeth abit more and when your
in a more senior position use what you are going through now as a
way of improving things for everyone, user, engineer and yourself.
On 26 Jan 2009, at 01:10, Angel Marquez wrote:
I think that is great advice. I like it. But their are some
enormous A-holes
that engineer.
Wow. This Us vs. Them shit is really a bit disturbing.
There are workplaces where people collaborate well. There are
workplaces where they don't. It has nothing to do with job titles,
schooling, or base training.
While there are engineers that are assholes, there are also designers
that are assholes. And managers. And customer service people. And just
about every other job.
Creating stereotypes by job description isn't any better than creating
them by race or religion or sexual preference.
Personally, I'd like to see this conversation move to something
constructive without the bigoted tone.
To answer the crux of Ali's question about what to do:
I always recommend that you follow the money. If there are usability
problems with a product, that means that there are people who are
frustrated.
In my experience, whenever someone is frustrated, that frustration
shows itself on the organization's bottom line. Either customers are
moving to competitor's products, or they are filling up the support
lines, or the developers are wasting time redoing designs because they
got it wrong the first time.
If you look for how the frustration is impacting the bottom line,
you'll often find someone in charge of making that problem go away.
That person is likely to be a huge champion for any UX work that can
fix their problem. Tell them that you know how to fix their problem in
cost-effective manner and you'll get their attention.
If there is no pain -- inotherwords, if the organization can't feel
how their hard-to-use product is hurting them -- then there is
probably nothing you can do. (Remember the first law of consulting:
You can't stop people from sticking beans up their nose.)
In this case, if you find this frustrating, you should consider
looking for an organization that does get it. There are more and more
of those every day and it'll be a better fit for your personality.
I wrote about this in more detail here: http://is.gd/heqq
Hope that helps,
Jared
Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
e: [email protected] p: +1 978 327 5561
http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks Twitter: jmspool
UIE Web App Summit, 4/19-4/22: http://webappsummit.com
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