- Regarding the look and feel of FogBugz (or say what you want to say about it...)
- It's profitable - It's a great product ... I've used it - It hits its target audience very well I don't know about you, but that's successful UX to me. - Regarding programmers as gatekeepers He's exactly right. Programmers, because of where they sit in the development process, are gatekeepers and have quite a bit of control over the product. And if they tune out the program manager and build something that, well, sucks, it's going to show. Smart programmers will realize this and work as a team, because flipping the bozo doesn't legitimize their answer of, "well, I decided to write it my way." Smart company management will say, "sure" are fire them, because that affects the bottom line. Does this happen alot? No. But I've seen it happen in good companies. - Regarding the program management job title Okay, let's change the job title to ice cream specialist. Joel's looking for someone for the job title for ice cream specialist, and this ice cream specialist has to have five years of user experience, uh, experience. They are going to be managing the process of developing software product. They call people who do user experience design ice cream specialists. And they have to be able to build wireframes and functional requirements in some form. Sounds like IX/UX to me. If it pertains to your experience, and you're getting paid to do the work you live, does it matter what the job title is? The reason Joel calls them that is because of the culture he's worked in. Microsoft had program managers as part of the process, and it worked because they were able to find people to play the role. Sure, some of their products sucked (BOB), but for Joel, a program manager was the perfect role because they were able to build cool Excel macros which the target audience was able to use. Or...effective UX. We get so frustrated with how UX/IX is not respected, and think there should be UX/IX titles in there, yet we never seek to understand the politics and/or structure of the company to figure who's doing the UX/IX, regardless of title or department. The reality is, IAs do the work, BAs do the work, Web Designers (god forbid, sometimes with their lack of understanding of taxonomies) do the work. The important thing is SOMEONE is doing UX/IX work, and they are doing it with SOME kind of process that represents a UX/IX process. That means doing personas (or not), wireframes (or not), ethnographic studies (or not). Personally, I could really care less what the job title is in the end. What I do care about is SOMEWHERE in the job description, there's a like that says, "requires 5 to 10 years of information architecture experience". If it says that, we've done our job. --- I saw one of the recaps of IXDA. One of the speakers had a great point: if we can't agree on a job title in front of HR, people will do it FOR us. This is just one example. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=39701 ________________________________________________________________ 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
