It Probably Won a Prize

Design is hard. A structural engineer must balance structural integrity and utilitarian function with the look and style of the building. Bridge engineers want to build strong and flexible bridges, capable of standing up to both fierce weather and the test of time; however, large bridges are points of interest for a city (or even a country) and must therefore be aesthetically pleasing and as unique as possible. Software engineers enjoy building specialized and interesting projects that allow people to achieve some meaningful goal, but often struggle to provide a user interface that is discoverable, easily understandable, and lives in the balance between not-enough-information and too-much-noise. In each case the problem can be resolved by bringing together a team of people who can marry pragmatic engineering with the needs of the users.

The success or failure of any software product can often be correlated, at least partially, to the degree of usability of the product. Usability is a sticky word in software development — it can refer many seemingly unrelated aspects of the product — but at the core it is a combination of three primary things: how easy the product is to learn, the visual appearance of the interface, and feature discoverability. Each of these is a very important part of the user experience, and each is exposed via the product documentation and the user interface of the product. However, since users don’t read documentation and even the best software is useless if nobody can figure out how to use it, the user interface becomes, quite possibly, the most important part of the software.

With this in mind it makes sense for a company to expend considerable resources to hire and train interface designers and to include them as a part of any development project. These individuals must somehow capture and visually represent the combination of what the software is actually capable of with what the user expects it to do, how they expect it to do it, and the way they expect it to look before, during, and after the procedure. Understanding and representing this conceptual model and then rendering it to the computer screen is the fundamental basis of interface design.

For us as software engineers, creating a good user interface design is usually an intractable problem. At the same time we tend to pooh-pooh interface designers; after all, how hard is it to throw some buttons and sliders up on the screen? However, the results speak for themselves: Many believe a primary reason that Linux distributions haven’t made significant inroads on the consumer desktop is because of their inattention to user interface design. Conversely, one of the biggest draws to Apple’s handheld offerings is the enormous (and largely successful) effort in that same area.

The truth is that user interface experts are an essential glue between engineers and users, and we should respect them as valued members of the team. Our product’s users will thank us.

Explicitly Ethical

Ethics. A subject which, outside of a seminar class in college or a mandatory semi-decadal company meeting, few people give any serious thought. After all, right is right and wrong is wrong, right? Ignoring contrived examples — save the lives of 5 strangers at the cost of a loved one? — it seems that most people live their lives, day by day, according to an implicit set of ethics. An implicitly ethical individual is usually a good person. They will probably make the right decisions, most of the time; and, when facing a difficult situation, they can mostly be relied on to do a good thing. If all this equivocation and hand waving doesn’t bother you, feel free to skip the rest of this post. The truth is that unless person sits down and intentionally focuses on what their own personal ethics are, nobody — including the individual in question — really knows what kind of person they are. To truly discover yourself you must be explicitly ethical. You must, at some specific point, decide what it is you believe in, what rules govern your behavior, what your own personal Articles of Ethics are. Others are quick to notice and understand an explicitly ethical person. They know that you are a good person. That you will make the right decision, each and every time. And, when faced with a difficult situation, they know that you can always be relied upon to do the right thing. Life is too short to equivocate. Now, go do the Right Thing™