[Sigia-l] What am I missing...

[Will Parker]

Paola:

I'm sorry if I've angered you with a perhaps too-glib statement. I  
should have included marketing personnel in the offender list. };->

My point is this:

I have seen innumerable otherwise fine, useful, and downright vital  
pieces of software or hardware where little or no thought was given  
to the user experience. "Ooh, look, we can make all the windows act  
like wobbly jelly!"

In many cases, the project was approved after a stellar programmer  
had a quite bright idea and was allowed to run with it without  
significant input from people who have direct experience fielding  
complaints from customers regarding previous products. Frankly, I  
have seen very few programmers with enough experience in UI design to  
understand that most people have neither the time nor inclination to  
learn radically new interfaces that break a dozen conventions on each  
step of a process.

Too often, I have had to explain, in words of one syllable, with  
accompanying animations, where products are failing in the field due  
to poor interfaces and why. Most often, the answer is "because nobody  
understands what you're showing them, where they are, and where they  
can go next". The next most common answer is "nobody above the age of  
15 cares that the windows act like wobbly jelly, and you want them to  
buy a new video card???!"

This is not to say that there are no programmers with UI design sense  
-- just that they're damned scarce, in my experience.

Flowser is a repository of all the sins listed above, and localizing  
the help text to perfect 'newspaper language' for the current locale  
isn't going to change that. The combined forces of Walter Cronkite  
and Dante Alighieri aren't going to change that. This isn't a  
mistranslation issue.

The Flowser interface was created because the programmer had a nifty  
idea that, frankly, doesn't solve any serious problems with Amazon  
and introduces several more. It's what people around here refer to a  
'resume project' -- a project designed to show off the skill of the  
developer, without consideration for the problems the project should  
solve.

Summary:

Programmers generally need adult supervision by someone who  
understands, in some vague way, that not everyone loves their  
computer enough to spend more than an hour a day figuring out how to  
use it.  Marketing personnel are not the correct source for adult  
supervision.

- Will
Will Parker
wparker at ChannelingDesign.com

"The only people who value your specialist knowledge are the ones who  
already have it." - William Tozier

On Nov 2, 2006, at 12:41 PM, Paola Kathuria wrote:

> Will Parker wrote:
>> [...] you have before you an excellent argument against allowing
>> programmers to participate in the design of user interfaces or
>> documentation?
>
> This is the kind of anti-programmer generalisation that led
> both me and my (programmer) husband to fling Alan Cooper's
> "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" across the room after
> just a few pages.
>
> If all the user interfaces that programmers were involved in
> were turned off, do you think you'd even be able to post a
> message to this list?
>
> Operating systems, the Internet, web browsers and mailers
> were created by programmers, and at a time likely without
> the help from designers.
>
> Imagine how good our deliverables would be if only designers,
> programmers and marketing folk appreciated and respected
> each others' work so that we could work together towards a
> common goal.
>
> Yes, some programmers think that design is a frivolous luxury
> only needed to make things clear for stupid people. However,
> they are not the majority. And many of us champion user-centred
> design.
>
> Don't bite the hand that feeds you.
>
>
> Paola, mightily miffed
> --
> http://www.paolability.com/