One day when I have time, I'd like to create a prettier (or, at least more personal) look for this blog. In the mean time, I've switched this to a different one of our standard templates. I found the dark brushed-metal one rather oppressive.
I thought I'd comment today on something closely related to the one I wrote last week.
Recently, I was talking with a project group about what they were doing. During the conversation, it became clear to me that they were doing something rather UI intensive, and they should have a user experience designer involved. When I suggested this, they answered "when we're further along, we'll think about it. We see UI as refinement."
Now, I was a little offended by this. As I reflected in my previous blog entry, architectural designs affect the UI, so regardless of how this reflected on me, it was also just wrong.
But, why is it "wrong"? I thought about it more and found this way of thinking about it:
The user experience is always being designed from at least the moment the first line of code is written, even if there is no usability designer involved at that point. So, when these folks said "We see UI as refinement", what they really said was "We like to do most of the UI design and then ask someone else to finish off the work that is either too boring or too far outside of our expertise." I can understand this, of course. We all like to hold on to the most creative control over the things we create. As a UI designer I've been known to try to hold on to more of the design process than I probably should have.
So, really, you have only two choices: you can explicitly do user experience design from the beginning of your development process, or you can do this implicitly and as a byproduct of other decisions. The implicit process, of course, has a much higher chance of delivering a product which users won't like using. If they don't like using it, they either won't, or your competitors will allow them to do the same thing in an easier way.