[Sigia-l] We could just use whiteboards instead.

[Listera]

"Adrian Howard" wrote:

> With Visio or similar it will take a good hour for them to become
> reasonably comfortable and several days for them to become fluent.
> Maybe I'm a bad teacher. Maybe I have exceptionally idiotic clients.

Nope, I'm sure you're a fine teacher, but you're a bad listener. :-) They
don't need to learn or become fluent in Visio, because, like I said, *all*
you are asking them to do in Visio is to create a (movable) box and put some
text into it, which is all what a post-it is and which can be thought to
anyone in about a minute.

> If I'm not misunderstanding your point I find this odd. It wouldn't
> make my work practices any better if I moved all my analog face-to-face
> meetings to IRC channels just because they're digital - would it?

*IF* people had the ability to (easily) create *digital* prototypes of their
*digital* products, I have zero doubt they will do away with these
Neanderthal contraptions. For a long time, people ignored  the fact that
they would create digital documents, print them out (analog), fax them
(analog), get corrections (analog), re-edit their digital document (digital)
and repeat the process. Now many realize that the digital-analog-digital
conversion is/was an insane waste of time and money. And most don't do that
anymore. I predict the same will happen to the process of
creating/prototyping of digital products.
 
> My goal is a good intranet, website or application. A Visio diagram (or
> whatever) is no more an intranet, website or application than a
> whiteboard or index card is.

Yes. And this is *precisely* why I advocate going to a fully functional
*digital* prototype as soon as possible. Sooner the better.
  
> I use whatever tools and practices I find make me most effective at
> reaching my goals. In many situations I have found my work practices
> better supported by tools like index cards and whiteboards than by
> diagramming applications and databases. Familiarity, ease of use, etc.
> is often more important to me and the people I work with than edit
> history, freedom from geographic constraints, etc.

Yes, and this too will change, like fax. I'm sorry to be a foreteller of
your bright and efficient future, just slightly ahead of its time. :-)
 
> I keep finding these humans involved in my web applications (defining
> business plans, running the company, writing content, meeting customer
> orders, talking to customers, etc. :-)

Unlike any other previous artifacts in our homo sapient history, online apps
are 100% synthetic and digital. I guess it'll take a bit of time for people
to recognize the historical uniqueness of this situation, and then they'll
adjust.
 
> I think that this is probably the primary difference. We have
> completely different work practices. In my book any "funnel" individual
> in a project is a bad thing since it instantly reduces the bus-number
> of the project to one. In my experience funnels lead to conflict and
> tedious sessions of office politics as the IA, UX, usability,
> developer, DBA, MBA top-dogs fight it out to see who gets to be most
> important.

Just in case you haven't been following my rants on this, I advocate getting
rid of these titular fiefdoms all together, by dividing the process into two
simple ones: design and development, bridged by a digital prototype.
Conception/vision and coding/implementation, none of these self-important,
self-serving narrow-domain specialists.
 
> Am I a sad old tree-hugging hippy? Possibly ;-)

A lot of hippies came back as venture capitalists and gave us the dotcom
debacle. Odd, huh? :-)

Ziya
Nullius in Verba