The lonliness of the Graphical User Interface designer...

[Jon Knight]

On Fri, 1 Dec 1995, Michael Alan Dorman wrote:
> Or maybe you misinterpret the motivation behind such alleged statements. 
> Try imagining their position -- speaking as a programmer, I often end up
> making ergonomic/design decisions because _no one else will take the
> responsibility of having an opinion_.  _Someone_ has to do it, and I 
> usually get stuck with it, despite my best attempts to get one of the 
> eventual consumers of my interface.

I do a fair bit of programming for libraries and librarians and I've hit
upon a cunning trick in the user interface department.  Most of my stuff
uses the WWW as the delivery mechanism to the end user and so the user
interface stuff is specified as HTML documents, FORMs, etc.  The beauty of
these is that I can write the backend CGI scripts to do the grunt database
work (which is most of what the library stuff I work on is in reality) and
then leave it to the librarians to argue about what to put in the HTML
forms.  All I usually supply is a ``default'' set of HTML documents and
the details of the attributes that they need to pass back from the FORMs. 
I often specifically say that they probably _won't_ want to give them to
the end users in that format but it will show them what they need to
include.  They can then go away and twiddle with the HTML, integrate
graphics and text in what ever way they think they're patrons will like,
etc, etc.  Of course if they get stuck in HTML land I'm also happy to 
come along and lend a hand on that as well, but they'll have to sit next 
to me saying yes and no or draw me pictures of what they want.

I _know_ I'm crap at user interface design so I leave it to others to do
that.  Its what we were taught to do in my 2nd Year undergraduate 
ergonomics course... :-)

Jon

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Department of Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND.  LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl.  More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *