On 24 Aug 2009, at 10:13, Martin wrote:
But then a few weeks down the line, out pops a pre-production
version of the
product that looks and behaves somewhat differently than specified
in your
design. It seems to me that no matter how good (comprehensive,
detailed)
your deliverables (be they annotated wireframes, a high functional-
fidelity
prototype, or whatever), the thing that gets built always ends up
deviating
from the design (to a greater or lesser extent).
So my question is: *What do you build into your process to prevent
this from
happening* (or at least to minimize it)?
Coincidentally this is one of the things I was ranting about to folk
at uxcamplondon on Saturday :-)
I think that folk need to do three things to stop this happening in
decreasing order of importance:
1) Be with the development team during development - so that you can
spot issues early and fix them. Ideally be in their team room 100% of
the time. If you can't do that check in at least daily.
2 Involve the developers in the design process - so that they
understand the "whys" of the design. The deliverables you showed the
stakeholders and developers isn't the design. The design is that thing
in your head. The deliverables are a communication tool. Unless people
understand the "why" they're going to miss some of things you're
trying to communicate with those deliverables. Paper and prototypes
are not as good at communicating as people.
2) Teach the developers more about UX principles - so they can see the
difference between important and unimportant changes. That way they
can understand more about when they can tweak something safely, and
when they need to call for advice. Leading you free to work on the
hard stuff.
Don't think about the implementation the developers are doing as a
separate process from the design. Think of it as design refinement.
It's a continuation of the process taking the concepts in your design
and embodying them in the code, and discovering lower level
abstractions that they're built on.
You need to work with the developers to make that happen well.
Cheers,
Adrian
--
http://quietstars.com - twitter.com/adrianh - delicious.com/adrianh
________________________________________________________________
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
