[Sigia-l] Designers and Developers

[Benjamin Kahn]

On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 22:57 -0400, Listera wrote:
> John Fullerton:
> >> why Developers shouldn't be in the design business
> > I'd like to hear more.
> 
> After nearly two decades of designing *and* developing every imaginable kind
> of app from standalone to interactive to client/server to web with a price
> tag from four to seven digits, in small and large settings, I've come to
> this simple conclusion: "design by committee" sucks.
> 
> For evidence, one need not go any further than a cursory survey of
> user-facing open source apps. Strong leadership is a sine qua non of good
> design.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your conclusions, but I think you'd
be surprised at how few open source projects have more than one person
working on them.  Open Source software's UI troubles come from a /lack/
of feedback and a lack of "design by committee", not because too many
people are contributing.

Open Source projects like GNOME are trying to move in the other
direction.  A small number of designers are trying to educate a large
number of developers about good design practices for applications.

They've produced design guidelines:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/

They produced documentation on user testing and scenarios:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/usertesting.html

They review applications for usability problems:
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.5/ui-review/

They explain why software needs to be usable:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/articles/

They even have resources for people to translate the project into any
human language:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/

Not to mention make application accessible:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/