[IxDA Discuss] Do Engineers Understand UX documents? (was "Alan Cooper on Software...")

[Joseph Selbie]

I love analogies between architecture and IX. I think there are many
similarities, but there are some significant differences that tend to work
against your point:

3) We need a clear set of standardized and simple deliverables. A
blueprint has most of what anyone needs to know about a particular
floor in a building. It has links to other drawings as well. But
everything lies mostly on one page. Sometimes UX documentation is
just too scattered (interaction guidelines, wireframes, detailed
object interactions). Put yourself on an engineers shoes. Would you
bother going through a pile of documents just to build the simplest
of things? That's why most of what engineers build upon what we
deliver them is so off on the first iteration.

Architecture is 3D and lends itself to diagrammatic representation. IX
design, in my opinion is 4D. The fourth dimension is time. Interactions are
by their very nature a series of events that take place on the time axis.
Representing the interactions that take place in time in a primary document
has always been a challenge -- thus story boards, annotations, prototypes,
etc. are necessary to communicate (at times poorly) the dynamic elements of
the project.

I would love to see standardization also, but I don't expect it soon.
Architecture has had 5 millennia to evolve some standards, software has had
5 decades :).

Joseph Selbie
Founder, CEO Tristream
Web Application Design
http://www.tristream.com