RE: Having Your Style Guide and Eating Your Fries Too

[Jim Shaeffer <jims -at- spsi -dot- com>]

Mary Deaton wrote, part: 

But it [user-centered design] begins with analysis of the user and the tasks
they need to
accomplish. Everything after that is to validate your original findings and
make mid-course corrections. The analysis time is the most critical part of
the process and ought to take as much as one-third of the overall project
schedule. No code should be written until user requirements are final.

-------<end quote>-------------------

Saying that "No code should be written until user requirements are final."
seems to imply that the mid-course corrections do not include changes to the
user profile. 
I submit that a team cannot complete the user requirements until the users
have responded to a couple of iterations of functional software. What users
say when they encounter the software is very enlightening about what is
really important to them. 
I have yet to see any combination of prose and pictures that conveyed the
same user experience as actually interacting with the software. I now
proceed on the assumption that creating such a combination of prose and
pictures is impossible. 

Jim Shaeffer (jims -at- spsi -dot- com)

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