[Sigia-l] Programming IAs was: Little things an IA MUST know/do

[John O'Donovan]

Todd said:
> Each member brings a different strength and component to the team.
> That's where the value is. There's little value in having a team full
> of jack of all trades - you'll end up without any experts.

But multi-disciplinary and multi-skilled does not mean Jack of all trades -
it means multiple disciplines within the team and each member being
multi-skilled. A design team needs this to thrive on an energy of ideas and
the more skills overlap the better the team will gel. Try giving a developer
a book by Donald Norman, Alan Cooper, JJG or others and you may just find
they won't use it to prop up the server.

Otherwise you're just designing blocks for the planet block as your thought
process becomes a design production line - wider knowledge gives wider
inspiration. Not that long ago, engineers were considered designers and
often only when you see these sorts of skills fuse do you get the best of
design (not talking about works of purely visual genius here - that's a
different thing).

What I said was:

> I think this is the wrong way to think about technical skills -  by
knowing
> more about the technical aspects you will enrich your designs. It should
not
> be seen as a negative thing.

People here complain about the techies telling them that they can't do this,
that or the other. The more you understand the issues the more you can head
this off and the more you can take advantage of the knowledge this gives
you.

As I said, I'm usually not concerned with the nuts and bolts these days, but
it helps a lot to know about them. My designs are enriched by understanding
the link between content production, visual design, interaction, data,
business and technical issues. I'm stronger in some areas than others but by
being informed on them all I can do my job better.

What I think doesn't work well is when the design is not fully informed
technically. You can turn a blind eye to it but you run three main risks:

- The design won't be feasible
- The design won't be implemented correctly
- It won't be as good as it could have been

Modern interface concepts have been technically led as much as by any other
discipline and yet the value of this knowledge is too easily discounted.
Look at Design Patterns, OOUI, Window based interfaces, Event models, etc...
As IAs look more at areas such as facets, visualisation and Enterprise IA,
knowledge of technical issues will be important.

George's post just popped in saying that:

"The critical skill is being able to _think_ in programming terms"

and along similar lines, an Alan Cooper quote:

"The most important thing is that I am saying, "People who haven't coded,
jerk the chain of programmer's". People who understand the programming
process and come at it from a developer's point of view, don't do that."

This manifests itself in many little ways but generally it just helps
improve the design. For example, I have worked with games designers who
produce layered, optimized graphics that make it as easy as possible to
animate them and convert them to interactive elements because they
understand how this will be done.

Ultimately the IA, the Interaction and the UI are built by the technical
team (software engineer, database developer, etc) so the more you know about
this area the more accomplished your designs will be.

It doesn't mean you have to grow a beard and wear sandals if that's your
favourite stereotype, but understand the issues as much as you dare.

Cheers,

jod