On 30 Apr 2009, at 12:49, Elle wrote:
[snip]
How do some of you, who have been in my situation, handle these types
of resistances, so that your application can be a good and usable
one?
[snip]
The best way I find to get out of these situations is to ask "Why?" -
possibly several times (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys :-)
Some of the reasons I discover have included things along the lines of
* Time constraints: "Well of course we could do Foo if we had 3 months
- but it needs to be released next week".
* Multi-tasking problems: "Well of course we could do Foo, but I'm
working on projects X & Y too. Boss says project X wins".
* Feature prioritisation issues: "Well of course we could do Foo, but
at the moment that bit of the system is functional - if ugly - and
OtherImportantFeature still needs finishing for sales to meet their
promises"
* Skill issues: "You can do Foo? How?" (just coz _you_ can do it
doesn't mean they can :-)
* Budget constraints: "Of course we could do Foo, but we only have
three days of money left"
* Reward structures: "Of course we could do Foo, but that's not a new
feature - that's just a UI fix - and we lose our bonus if we don't
ship another new feature this month"
* Organisational issues: "You can tell me to do Foo all you like, the
only person who can get me to switch from my current task is my boss"
* Previous experiences: "Every time a designer tells me to change
something, it comes back to bite us with bad customer reports & failed
projects" (There are a lot of bad designers out there unfortunately.
Some really good developers have only worked with bad designers. This
can colour their view of the group...)
... and so on ...
More often than not I find that the underlying reason for the "no"
makes perfect sense to the person saying it. More often than not the
root cause turns out to be a business/organisational issue rather than
anything related to the ux/dev folk.
Sometimes "no" turns out to have been the right answer given the whole
context.
Do your devs have reasons for their "no"?
Cheers,
Adrian
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