[IxDA Discuss] Create winning HW/SW designs (was Re: Bill Moggridge talk at Ideo tonight)

[Edwin Booth]

 On Saturday, November 04, 2006, at 09:03AM, "Jared M. Spool" <jspool at uie.com> wrote:
>Can we get a good night's rest, snap out of this bickering about whose 
>personal name tag has better foundations, and focus on how we get our 
>entire community to know what they need to know to create winning designs? 
>That's the question I'm most interested in.

Excellent point Jared! I was perhaps needlessly provocative ...apologies for leading toward the rat hole of professional self-righteousness.

A challenge with integrated hardware/software products is getting the hardware and software teams to meaningfully collaborate - in a way that actually blends the hardware and software design decisions. Peter's inventory of the iPod UI/iTunes UI is interesting but it's all software. There's nothing hardware about it - the main points of hardware-to-software interface are the scroll wheel and the USB cable (and of course the standard desktop controls). 

Once those two things were decided the software and hardware could be developed in isolation from one another. Moreover, the decision on the scroll wheel was probably not dependent on the design of the menuing system - in all likelihood, the decision on the scroll wheel drove the UI  - but I haven't read the book on this one. Once you decide that the device UI is a text-based menu, then you can send an IA-minded person off to figure out the labels and the hierarchy. 

In this kind of situation, there's really not a lot of overlap between the IA-minded folks and the hardware-focused folks.

As someone who works with industrial designers, I'm most interested in finding ways to surface the concepts, ideas and desired experience of the software system(s) to the hardware and vice versa. A lot of it boils down to the decisions around the hardware controls (i.e. is it a capacitive touch panel, a directional+select, dedicated buttons, etc. But there's got to be more to it, greater potential for HW/SW permeability within an integrated hardware and software system. 

That's, hopefully, more interesting that debating who figure what out first. :-)