We all understand the problem here, right? I think instead of expounding on it to each other, we could help Ali figure out how to change his manager's thinking.
While it's nice for us to formally label what we do, "that thing that makes stuff cool, elegant, and easy to use," interaction design," lots of shops aren't even thinking about this part of the process as a different discipline. It's all _making the product. As we know, in most places, the pprocess still tends to be driven by engineers (even at Apple!). If the product development process happens to include someone with smart insights and methods to make the product more compelling, so be it. Eventually, Ali could call his methods user-centered design (or whatever process they end up adopting), but not until they've already been doing it for a while. So to you, Ali, the way I would approach this is by actually doing design work here and there to show your teams this "magic" that interaction designers do, and demonstrate how it can help them build the right thing from the start. This won't be pretty. When I started out, I introduced one of my teams to personas . I failed miserably-- personas weren't the right tool at the time. Everyone was already on the same page about core goals and scenarios. What they really needed was "a map to organize the product's functionality." I didn't tell them we were doing an Information Architecture until after they told me it was helpful :-). Any other tips for Ali on bringing design to an "engineering-driven" shop? It's easy to forget that for some of us, this alone is half of our jobs. - Nasir ________________________________________________________________ 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
