Bill Scott [Netflix] comments on the differences between user experience or interface designers and the engineers which implement those designs:
Design teams feel finished when they have produced a comp and the necessary graphical assets. But the interface engineering team is just starting their work. The trick is to get interface engineers involved much earlier in the process and to get designers to stay engaged throughout the full production cycle. Engineers are production focused. Designers are often ideation focused.
I treat the Product/UE as Engineers customers. It is my job to say yes to their designs and implement them. Too often engineers think they are experts in UE and should determine how a website behaves or looks. This is incorrect. US is a specialist profession that collects data empirically through focus groups and user experience labs. User Experience professionals, while understanding technology, do not tell engineers what technology to use. The inverse should be true too.
There are limitations in the customer approach, a large being that technology cannot always implement the designer's vision. In those instances I have the engineer work directly and intimately with the UE designer to get something that will achieve the design and user experience goal within the limitations of the technology, system or whatever other engineering restraint we are facing. This has worked excellently and helped to raise the level of satisfaction in the final product that Product/UE and Engineering have.
I agree that designers need to be involved in the entire process, even though one of the downsides is the spec document tends to remain volatile and informal until the final weeks of the project when it is handed off to QA. Having the designer and engineer work together to get a feature honed will remove some of that volatility.
The other mechanism to dampen spec volatility is to treat the whole process as informal until the feature complete milestone is reached. After that point the project formalizes with a finalized spec, formal test cases and engineers hands off on feature and only engaged in quality improvements and bug fixes. By that point Engineering's customer changes from Product/UE to QA where the deliverable is feature complete and working code.
By that point features are the last thing on Engineering's mind as the codebase is put into a mode of dampening to that it can be packaged and readied for release.
The alternative to that method is to fix the spec before the project starts and make concrete scoping from that. This is great for marketing as Engineering will not commit to the project until it is absolutely certain it can do it, and that the project can be completed in the scoping provided; but really, that sucks for both designers and engineers; and projects do have to have a cowboyish element to them in order to have fun with your job.
I enjoy betting on our guys, and I enjoy telling Product/UE we can do it, or that we will have a go at it, and if we cant do it, we will work with UE to come up with something that will solve their user experience issue. This approach works well, produces strong products and is an enjoyable manner to work.
Phoenix Eats Out is the restaurant review site for
Phoenix,
Scottsdale and
Old Town Scottsdale which lists the modernist and contemporary restaurants, taverns and bars in the greater Phoenix area.
This is the list of the most popular restaurants pages from phoenixeatsout.com that have been viewed the most;
My personal favourite restaurants in Phoenix are
AZ88,
Postinos,
Bomberos with
Grazie,
Humble Pie,
Orange Table,
The Vig,
Fez and others coming close behind. View the complete list with the photo-journalistic style images on
phoenixeatsout.com
Arizona is an outdoor state and has lots of hiking in the city and around the state. Phoenix is unusual for most cities in having several large mountains in the center of the city with great hiking. Anyone who comes to Phoenix has to do the
Echo Canyon trail on Camelback and the
Summit Hike on Squaw Peak or Piesta Peak. The views of the city, suburbs and surrounding mountains are wonderful from Camelback and Piesta Peak.
For more experienced hikers there is the McDowell Mountains in North Scottsdale that has several difficult and strenuous hikes in
Tom's Thumb and
Bell Pass. Alternatively, you can hike the highest mountain in Arizona. At 12,600 feet
Humphrey's Peak is a long and difficult hike.
Between 2004 and 2009 this site,
southsearepublic.org, was a constitutional blog based on scoop which focused on Australian and global constitutional issues.
One of the strongest aspects of it was the development of constitutions by those involved in the blog. These constitutions are the outcome:
The constitutions were built using principles from Montesquieu's separation of powers, the enlightnment's universal political rights and the ancient Athenian technology of sortition and choice by lot.
South Sea Republic started in 2004 as an Australian constitutional blog in 2004 based on scoop software. It was an immigrative outgrowth of Kuro5hin. The archives for each year since then;
The articles are ordered by views.
I am an Australian living in the United States as a permanent resident.
I am a software developer by trade and mostly work in Java and jump between middleware and front end.
I originally worked in the New York area of the United States in telecommunications before moving to Washington DC and
working in a mix of telecommunications, energy and ITS. I started my own software company before heading out to
Arizona and working with Shutterfly. Since then I have joined a startup in the Phoenix area and am thoroughly enjoying myself.
I do a lot of photography which I post on this website, but also on flickr. I have a photo-journalistic website which lists
the modernist and contemporary restaurants in phoenix. I have a site on the
Australian Flying Corps [AFC] which has been around since the 1990s and which I unfortunately
lost the .org URL to during a life event; however, it is under the
www.australianflyingcorps.com URL now.
The AFC website has gone through several iterations since the 90s and the two most recent are
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2004-2002) and
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2002-1999) which are good places to start.
