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On 7/7/1999 11:37 AM, Donald Le Vie (dlevie -at- VLINE -dot- NET) wrote:
>P.S. You may want to make this your mantra: "[Programmers] cannot
>successfully be asked to design for users because...inevitably, they will
>make judgments based on the difficulty of coding and not on the user's real
>needs."
Um... you *may* want to make that your mantra, but you'll soon lose the
cooperation and respect of the very programmers you need to make the
changes you want.
The best UI designers I've worked with have been programmers. I feel that
I as a tech. writer have a great deal to offer the programmers to improve
the UI, but any claims that I and I alone represent the users would
deafen the programmers to any suggestions I had to make.
My suggestion is to respect how difficult it is to create a good GUI and
to admit how easy it is to sit there after the fact pointing out ways to
tweak it for the better. Once you do that, you'll be able to make genuine
improvements to the UI by working with, not against, the programmers.
