[Sigia-l] RIA: the wrong tree?

[Pierre Abel]

Stew Dean wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>   
>  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.
>
>   
I have the same experience (and I did the mistake too when I was not-UX 
educated developer).Developers (with no UX-mindset) I deal with like 
"consistency" when building GUI.For example, they like using a standard 
property sheet to edit a record. Why ?  Because they have developed a 
nice framework that automatically build the property sheet GUI from a 
data set, and each time there is a new data set to edit, they use the 
nice framework to build a GUI that is very consistent but out of context 
and lead to bad UX. My experience with this kind of framework is that 
when you begin to want to customize a property sheet it becomes a 
nightmare (but it is still efficient in some case)

I was wondering where the "consistency" problem comes from...and I think 
that it may comes partially from the developer's background : Object 
Oriented Analysis and Design. In that process, object reuse encouraged. 
So in the developer mindset, when something is reusable, it is good. 
Another aspect this mindset is automation, you try to automate 
everything to gain time and prevent you to do boring work. So when a 
developer, with no UX-mindset, design the GUI, he uses the same 
paradigms ( I will build a (reusable) framework that automatically build 
the GUI).

Anyone knows a book about the sociological aspects of developer ;-) ?

Pierre

PS: Note that I have nothing against consistency which is great in many 
case!