Re:Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody
by mitjak on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @01:21AM
(#2940225)
Sounds like a potentially useful experience but, what does a development lead have to do with designing good UI?
Re:Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody
by bane on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @08:47AM
(#2941174)
In small companies, people often fill multiple rolls. Our dev lead happens to be our lead UI designer as well -- but we all provide feedback. Sticking him on part-time tech support duty was a creative way of both giving us another tier of support while simultaneously forcing him to deal with our regular 'ol user.
Experiencing the mind of the typical user day after day has caused some major changes in his UI design philosophy. Don't bury things in menus, limit the number of ways you can do something, walk users through set procedures, etc.
There's a bunch of different approaches to interface design and many of them don't work well. We've all seen the beautiful but hard to use designs made by professional designers, and the control-panel-of-a-spaceship design made by developers.
It seems that what both cases miss out on is spending time working with and understanding the average guy on the street. Or rather, good interface design means spending lots of time optimizing for regular users.
Spending 2 years in hell doing phone tech support for an ISP after high school was probably the most valuable career experience I've ever had bar none.
Nothing has prepared me for making and selling software to regular people better than this experience. Entire assumptions about how users interact with computers, ones based on my own experience, were rendered useless.
The ways regular people think about technology is endlessly fascinating because it very rarely has anything to do with how I think about technology.
At my day job, we eventually decided to put our development lead as tier-2 tech support because we couldn't get this across. He receives every single piece of support mail we get and is asked to respond to a pretty good percentage of them.
It's been a 2 year, very difficult, education for him.