VIA Interaction

Friday, July 07, 2006

Form before function

Sometimes you worry that because you are carrying a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But I wasn't long into the User Interface Design world before it made intuitive sense to me that the UI design should drive the project.

What is a computer other than a tool? And if the person interacting with the tool cannot use it, then what's the point?

Still, since most development projects come out of IT, too often the engineers are driving the product. (I think one of the trends toward outsourcing is a sense that a lot of the programming required by most development projects is a commodity. That's another story.)

Here's an interesting yet unsurprising piece from a panel discussion about the development of Apple's OSX operating system and Microsoft's Longhorn.

At Apple, the user interface design drove the project:

# To what extent did engineering vs. design drive development? Apple: definitely driven by design. Engineers would ask 'please don't show this to Steve'. Jobs compared pixel to pixel from Director prototype to OSX prototype, if it wasn’t right it had to be fixed.
#

Microsoft: more collaborative. Some ideas came from design some from development.

There was also this interesting note:

# Apple: no user testing at all due to the secrecy of the project. This was not the way they had designed up to that point but for OSX they relied on senior designers instead. With the first release there were some things that would probably have gotten caught with testing.

It's difficult for me to imagine developing an easy-to-use interface without some user testing.

posted by Tim Beidel at 7/07/2006 06:46:00 AM

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