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

[Stewart Dean]

Will wrote.

 
> 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.

It's difficult to avoid stereotypes but the above tends to be true. I have met exceptions to this of course,  programmers with a good grasp of accessibility and user interface and marketing folks who get user experience. 
I think it's down to mind set - and there is a very 'marketing' mind set which is about owning the customer and extracting information about the user at all costs and there is the engineering mind set.  I think it's the engineering mind set I have the biggest problem with - it's the inability to separate the concept of the interface from it's implementation. 

Your wobbly jelly example, I presume relating to a pretty nasty interface created to sit on top of Linux whose name I forget, is a good example. It makes people go 'wow' for about 2 minutes and then just kinda irritates. I havnt seen vista yet but I'm eager to see if it's gone too far down the wow path, I missed a London event where Microsoft where going to tell us about user experience (related to their suite of web development tools - anyone catch that?) but they've always suffered from an overly engineering mind set.  Even apple are not free form this.  It was an engineer that created the action of dragging the floppy disk into the bin to eject it.  

Also it was engineers that resulted in a user interface on the London tube touch screen devices far weaker than the excellent New York ticket machines.  Engineering is there to ensure the solution works, not to alter the solution so that the engineering works in my view.  

Stewart Dean