[Sigia-l] "Devignders"?

[Stew Dean]

On 14/05/07, Ziya Oz <listera at earthlink.net> wrote:
> "People who spend half their time in developer tools and half their time in
> design tools² are internally called by Microsoft "devignders," according to
> John Richards of the Windows Live team.
>
> Would you ever use "devignder" to label yourself, if you fit the
> description?

'Design tools?'  Is Visio a design tool or do they mean Photoshop?

I'd tend to call them 'hackers' as in people who hack together
solutions rather than creating an architecture for then.
Implementation, in my view, needs to have a relative, but not
absolute, separation from the IA process   My reasoning behind this is
that good design requires a perspective free from many of the
limitations of implimentation. I can say this by viewing others and
also learning from the way I work myself, if you are thinking about
the details of implementation whilst you are creating the overall
architecture you will come up with a disjointed user experience with
lots of arbitrary widgets and solutions rather than something seamless
and simple.  It will also lack any innovation as it'll be built for
safe parts. This is why I feel overly technically focused people tend
not make good information architects - they are too into bells and
whistles.

In my mind this is the failing of many Microsoft products and other
companies such as Motorola. User experience people should be able to
shape the nature of the engineering solution so it supports the user
experience. Call me an extremist but I think user experience should
have priority over engineering, a situation I'm sure many here would
like to be in. The maxim I used with implementation is that the answer
for any solution should be 'yes' given enough time and money.

-- 
Stewart Dean