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

[Will Parker]

On Nov 2, 2006, at 3:34 PM, Stewart Dean wrote:

>
> 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.

Same here. There are always wonderful exceptions.

> 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.

Bingo!
>
> 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.

It's called XGL. We can hope that everyone except the video card  
manufacturers will forget about it as well. (The subject being Linux,  
it won't be, and we'll see the effect spread to the interior of  
document windows in the next version of OpenOffice.)

> I havnt seen vista yet but I'm eager to see if it's gone too far  
> down the wow path,

My Windows box is too anemic to handle Vista, but I have been  
following the Vista demos as they come out. The eye candy factor is  
still there, but they appear to have dropped the really silly wobbly  
stuff I saw in early demos. The translucent UI elements, mark my  
words, are going to cause trouble for users -- something similar was  
(strongly!) proposed for the Mac Office formatting palette, but  
layers of translucent text over text-heavy document windows, it turns  
out, is A Very Bad Thing, so we whittled it back.

> 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.

FWIW, I would say the engineering mind set is quite different in  
Microsoft's MacBU. The programmers there are used to getting  
incredibly detailed functional and UI specs, and so they focus on  
following the specs and asking tough(er) questions about expected  
application and UI behavior.

This may be true in other groups at Microsoft, but I'd agree that  
overall, Microsoft needs a darned good brainwash.

> Even apple are not free from this.  It was an engineer that created  
> the action of dragging the floppy disk into the bin to eject it.

I think we can chalk that one up as a "TOO! MUCH! PRESSURE!!"  
decision. :-}

> <SNIP>

> Engineering is there to ensure the solution works, not to alter the  
> solution so that the engineering works in my view.

Hear-Hear! Hurrah!



- Will
Will Parker
wparker at ChannelingDesign.com

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