[Sigia-l] "Degree of Difficulty"

[Ziya Oz]

One of the things you get to learn after designing for two decades is to
accurately and rapidly estimate how long a project/problem will take to
conceptualize/design/build. This is not the same as project management
process counting, but essentially pre-visualizing degree of difficulty for a
bunch of interrelated flows. Not just because you may have done something
similar in the past, but because you can just "feel" the ingredients of
difficulty involved.

It's not always easy for me to articulate this to clients, especially those
who are not designers. Some items they think ought to be fairly easy, I know
will be difficult; many things they fret over as being hard, I know will be
second nature to me or to an experienced designer. Some things are just
harder to nail down. To take it to, say, 7 on a scale of 1-10 is reasonable
effort, but to raise it a notch to 8 or 9, you know will be really hard.

Anyway, Malcolm Gladwell recently wrote about this from a sports angle:

<http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2006/09/degree_of_diffi.html>

How do you express this to your management/clients?

----
Ziya

Usability >  Simplify the Solution
Design >  Simplify the Problem