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Chris Borokowski <athloi -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
Of the programmers I know who are good, they do an excellent job of
what it is they are supposed to be doing, which is make solid code. But
they're going to need someone else to make the interface workable, and
then figure out if the application as a whole works toward any real
goal.
Richard Lewis responds:
I have to disagree with you here Chris. Effective design is based on having a comprehensive, integrated understanding of the end-users goal's, the essential tasks that need to be performed to accomplish those goals, and, most importantly, the interrelationships between those tasks. If the interface is poor, it is because the designers did not have this understanding. Without such understanding, the overall design is poor; and if the overall design is poor, the structure of the code is going to relatively primitive. A solid solution (i.e., code) can not be done without a solid understanding of the problem (i.e., what the system is supposed to do).
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