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

[Daniel Yang]

Due to this thread, I decided to just directly ask the developers I  
work with what they thought. Since I work so closely with them daily,  
if there's a doubt or question they just ask me. I realize that in  
larger organizations, there is more isolation between groups so the  
documents have to speak for themselves. Thus I also asked my developer  
friend at Yahoo for that perspective. For the most part, annotated  
wireframes, concise written explanations, and a complete set of visual  
designs is sufficient for most things. Unless the interaction is  
completely new or unusual, the (good) developers know how to build  
common UI elements (think typical suburban home vs. Gehry building).

However, I did find that one developer preferred if everything was  
spelled out in a sort of a tech. spec list fashion (hex colors, fonts  
sizes, dimensions) for the visual stuff. While another preferred to  
ignore those indications and go into the PSD files and measure it  
himself. The reason for the latter being that the direct translation  
of those specs aren't perfect when implemented in code, so he is doing  
a semantic translation. This is probably why it's important to have  
all of these different document forms saying the same thing  
differently. Different developers work in different ways just like  
everybody else. As long as the end results are what I planned, I don't  
really care too much about their particular process for getting there.

FYI, I export all my spec docs to Wiki-style HTML after writing them  
in VoodooPad. I try to indicate whenever things are being shared  
between web pages so the developer doesn't start building the same  
thing twice. I also try to include as many "See: [link]" and other  
crosslinks so the developers don't have to poke around the document to  
find relevant information. It's all in one huge document with links  
from page to related page.

I'll continue to do my informal interviewing of developers and report  
if I find anything interesting.

-Dan


On Nov 2, 2007, at 2:56 AM, Bruno Figueiredo wrote:

> 1) We need a standardized visual language so that whenever we change
> jobs we don't need to learn yet another way to document things.
> Architects have their own visual language and it's consistent from
> the US to Japan. Any engineer or builder can pick up an architect's
> drawing and start building straight-away.