| |||||||||||||
McCann: Cross Cut [the future of Nautilus]McCann: Cross Cut [the future of Nautilus]Posted Aug 6, 2012 17:29 UTC (Mon) by hummassa (subscriber, #307)In reply to: McCann: Cross Cut [the future of Nautilus] by sorpigal Parent article: McCann: Cross Cut [the future of Nautilus]
You obviously never met a designer in your life.
> I understand that all designers are impractical people who will happily produce something insane and impossible and then insist that it's brilliant in the face of all objection.
Any person who does that is not a designer at all. Designers make extensive previous user-centered research, with tools like etnographic research, questionnaires and others. And designers, during the development of their products, do EXTENSIVE and INTENSIVE prototyping and testing WITH THEIR TARGET AUDIENCES, using A/B testing and other user testing tools. Engineers and software developers, OTOH, tend to think mistakingly they are the target audience, and they have vices like engraving the product or service with their own preferences, or removing important (from the point of view of the user) features, or, worse yet, setting novelty features as default (which breaks the user workflow 99% of the time).
Good design drives development in the direction of the user. The developers should help with the input and point the possibility of technical problems, or technically solve those problems. It's just like air traffic controllers show pilots where they should take their planes. Pilots still have to control the plane, but the important thing is that THE PASSENGERS arrive where they want to.
(Log in to post comments)
McCann: Cross Cut [the future of Nautilus] Posted Aug 11, 2012 14:35 UTC (Sat) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
> And designers, during the development of their products, do EXTENSIVE and INTENSIVE prototyping and testing WITH THEIR TARGET AUDIENCES
This clearly wasn't done with GNOME, or the target is wrong. If all of that research and testing leads to GNOME3, then the process is wrong, the execution is wrong or the conclusions are ignored.
> Engineers and software developers, OTOH, tend to think mistakingly they are the target audience
> Good design drives development in the direction of the user.
> The developers should help with the input and point the possibility of technical problems, or technically solve those problems. It's just like air traffic controllers show pilots where they should take their planes.
If you do X and it leads to Y, and Y is something you don't like, then maybe you should stop doing X. What happened that lead to this disaster? I say "Blindly following the designer's crazed theories," but I'm not married to that interpretation if an alternative can be suggested that also matches the observed reality. If your counter is "This isn't a disaster" then I'm sorry, I was talking to the people who recognize that there is a problem and want to fix it, not those who are contributing to it.
McCann: Cross Cut [the future of Nautilus] Posted Aug 13, 2012 16:50 UTC (Mon) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
The whole point of my post was: there were no designers involved in GNOME development.
They don't even know what their target audience is, which is why they keep pissing off people who actually use their software with every upgrade.
> Your analogy is backwards. Designers are the air traffic controllers, developers are the pilots.
That is EXACTLY my analogy, either I didn't express myself correctly (possible, sorry, English as a foreign language here) or you didn't understand it... please read again.
> If you do X and it leads to Y, and Y is something you don't like, then maybe you should stop doing X. What happened that lead to this disaster? I say "Blindly following the designer's crazed theories," but I'm not married to that interpretation if an alternative can be suggested that also matches the observed reality. If your counter is "This isn't a disaster" then I'm sorry, I was talking to the people who recognize that there is a problem and want to fix it, not those who are contributing to it.
Again, my point was GNOME had no designers. Designers would not have lead them to the present disaster, and oh boy, is GNOME 3 a disaster... (even if it is kinda cool, it's still missing parts and it's not installable alongside "just works" GNOME2, so...)
|
|||||||||||||