[Sigia-l] RIA: the wrong tree?

[Stew Dean]

On 24/05/07, Ziya Oz <listera at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Stew Dean:
>
> > developers make poor interface designers
>
> Puzzlement: folks at 37signals or Ranchero/Brent Simmons (NetNewsWire),
> Xlife/David Watanabe (Xtorrent, Acquisition, Newswire), etc produce
> exemplary UIs while they generally call themselves developers, and not
> designers.

That makes it sound like you're either a developer or a designer.
That's a false dichotomy. Developers design as much as visual
designers, just in different ways.

My statement is a generalisation and there are always exceptions, and
I include myself in that I can code and have been employed for my
coding skills. I also have been employed for my graphic design skills.
BUT to design effective end interfaces you need to be able to put
yourself in a non engineering mind set and a non graphic design mind
set.

I hold you can't effectively design for any given platform without a
good degree of technical knowledge but you also need to able to free
yourself from that knowledge when initially creating interface ideas.
Some ideas are informed by the technology, many ideas only happen when
you forget about the technology for a while and think in terms of what
the users want.

It is a mind set, one a developer or a 'designer' can have. My problem
is that an engineering mindset tends to lead to bad solutions and that
is the mindset of many developers.

If you really want an example of a engineering vs user experience mind
set then the placement of buttons on many microsoft solutions at the
top left is logical from an engineering point of view but not form a
user experience point of view where we know, through experience, the
action is better after the thing you are actioning.  Also look out for
overly consistent solutions where one solution is used for everything
ignoring context. I'm currently having direct experience of this on a
new project I'm working on I may mention in future posts.

Cheers

Stewart Dean