The Answer (finally) (Was [Sigia-l] Internal usability/UE tea ms)

[Gray, Laurie]

Adding an anecdote here to Lyle's (mostly) serious points -

Recently, when our development team staffed up, I was swamped because they
were able to address multiple projects concurrently or a single project more
quickly.

I don't know what that magic ratio/number might be, but in our instance, at
some point, they reached critical mass where they had 5 or so developers on
each team (I think we have a total of about 15 developers or so these days -
many are contractors) and could begin to address things more quickly.

I will add, also, that changes in departmental and team management also had
an impact on their ability to absolutely devour anything I could produce.

To Adamya's point, I am not sure that this staffing up resulted in an
excellent level of user experience because now *I* was behind the 8-ball.
Bringing on a contractor to help out with what I was doing would not have
been an effective short-term solution because of a tight launch deadline,
but we decided that a better choice was to hire a graphic artist to take
some of the design pressure off of me, allowing me to focus on the bottom
half of JJG's Elements of User Experience model, while allowing him to focus
on the top half.

None of it, Lyle, involved bananas. ;)

Laurie
(working for a dot-com)

-----Original Message-----

Adamya, 

As an "internal" myself, I can sense where your question might be coming 
from...and I feel your pain.

I don't have any magic ratios, but some factors that should be 
considered based on the context/company:
-----Original Message-----
From: adamya at gmail.com [mailto:adamya at gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 3:57 PM
To: listera at rcn.com
Cc: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Internal usability/UE teams


> > I am especially interested in the ratio of information architects, 
user
> > experience/interaction designers and software developers required in
> > organizations so that an excellent level of end-user experience is 
assured in
> > projects and products.