I believe it's important, particularly in the current über-cost-conscious climate, to think of IxD as a discipline, rather than a job description.
Depending on the mix of talents, personalities and experience in a software organization, it may or may not be necessary to have a full-time interaction designer. A lot of very worthwhile software projects are designed, built and managed by a single person. That person is "doing" interaction design whether they know it or not. This has its most obvious reflection in the progress the Agile movement has made in the last few years. Agile makes a lot of sense to the bean-counters, because it allows small teams to deliver (more-or-less) functional software really quickly. The challenge for people like us will lie in finding ways to insert ourselves into these processes. Not only to keep putting bread on the table, but to make sure that we don't see another generation of really awful software. For a lot of us, that's going to mean we have to either get our hands dirty and start coding, or else ease up on the reigns and let the developers think they're running things. Because, let's face it. Without an interaction designer, you end up with bad software. Without a developer, you end up with no software at all! There. I think I used my one-exclamation-point-per-message pretty well, don't you? On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 5:02 PM, Russell Wilson <[email protected]>wrote: > That's what I understood his point to be > > Sent from my iPhone > > > On Mar 9, 2009, at 6:47 PM, mark schraad <[email protected]> wrote: > > So the theory is to cloak the designer as a program manager? Or did I >> twist that a bit? >> >> >> On Mar 9, 2009, at 3:42 PM, Russell Wilson wrote: >> >> "Lacking a program manager, your garden-variety super-smart programmer is >>> going to come up with a completely baffling user interface that makes >>> perfect sense IF YOU'RE A VULCAN (cf. git). The best programmers are >>> notoriously brilliant, and have some trouble imagining what it must be >>> like >>> not to be able to memorize 16 one-letter command line arguments. These >>> programmers then have a tendency to get attached to their first ideas, >>> especially when they've already written the code." >>> >>> How to be a program manager >>> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/03/09.html >>> >>> What Geoffrey Moore, Donald Norman, Paul Graham, Heidi Roizen, Jennifer >>> Aaker, Michael Lopp, and Ryan Carson all have in common? >>> >>> http://www.businessofsoftware.org/ >>> >>> -- >>> Joel Spolsky >>> [email protected] >>> ________________________________________________________________ >>> 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 >>> >> >> ________________________________________________________________ > 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 > ________________________________________________________________ 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
