[Sigia-l] Can UI designers kill people?

[Patrick Neeman]

Some people may not agree with the next statement:

Before the web (and there are a lot of us that had jobs other than tech
before the web), I was editor of a community paper in Southern California.
We had a couple of copy editors that were older, worked with us. We got on
the topic talking about Journalism degrees, and the copy editor's degree was
in Finance. He stated that many of the universities where he went to school
(United Kingdom) didn't have Journalism degrees because the academics felt
you shouldd be knowledgable in an area of study, not just a skill.

Programming, UI design, IA Design, etc. are skills, and in many companies,
sometimes there is a need to combine skills of a couple of these because the
company and/or department are so small, and I personally feel that many
programmers should be skilled in UI design, to realize how their solutions
function in real world environments, and how to design as such. People whose
skill sets are in silos may be good for specialized situations and large
teams, but most of us aren't working in large teams, I would suppose.

P@

> -----Original Message-----
> From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org] 
> On Behalf Of Listera
> Sent: Friday, January 09, 2004 10:57 AM
> To: SIGIA-L
> Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Can UI designers kill people?

> Here, I went to Dice.com and typed in "gui developer 
> designer" and the very first entry is:
> 
> Title: 
> 
> GUI Designer - developer
> 
> Skills: 
> 
> Refinement of a user interface through several iterations
> - an interface that involved navigation
> - an interface that involved annotation or classification
> - an interface that involved multiple simultaneous updateable 
> views of the same "workspace" 
> Evaluation of a user interface through studies of real users
> 
> Job description:
> 
> Position is responsible for design, development and 
> enhancement of Java user-facing code. This person will 
> architect and implement user interfaces for our 
> next-generation tools for business professionals and for 
> application developers, with responsibility for both code, 
> usability and learnability issues, including interactive 
> performance, aesthetics, and integration with user experience 
> guidelines of base level environments (IDE or Office tool). 
> Candidates should be able to explain the design principles 
> and tradeoffs considered, and the end result, of previous 
> work on GUI Design and Development.
> 
> Requirements:
> [Highlights]
> 
> Rapid prototyping in Java with Swing (Level4 - Can perform 
> without assistance. Has in-depth knowledge)
> 
> Eclipse SWT (Level3 - Can perform with assistance. Has 
> applied knowledge)
>  
> DOM and SAX API programming (Level3 - Can perform with 
> assistance. Has applied knowledge) 
>  
> Concepts and standards of XML (Level3 - Can perform with 
> assistance. Has applied knowledge)
> 
> J2EE development - EJBs, JSPs (Level3 - Can perform with 
> assistance. Has applied knowledge)
> 
> Etc.
> 
> In other words, you have to be a programmer.
> 
> Now, you might say this is probably some small company lost 
> its way in the job req definition wonderland. Indeed, it's a 
> company some people here often put up as the beacon of hope 
> for our profession: IBM.