[ol]
[li]As someone else said, school ain’t the working world.[/li][li]Not everyone who is a programmer has a B.A. In comp sci.[/li][li]Just because you’ve been told to pay attention to the interface doesn’t mean you know anything about good design.[/li][li]I never said people might not have opinions, or that they might seek out opinions of others/users, but that still doesn’t mean the design will be good.[/li][/ol]
I know they’re not the same, I was just saying it surprised me. Also dropzone’s thing scares me. I can’t imagine that at all. If you’re part of a company (which is just a really big team) isn’t everyone’s problem everyone else’s problem? If someone lies it sucks, but you still have to accomplish your task even to the cost of your own health (within acceptable bounds, if you get too sick or too stressed it’s a net negative) because if someone in the team or chain is wrong everyone is wrong. Even if you hate what you’re doing someone in the team probably doesn’t and you should do it for them, shouldn’t you? It seems that you should spend every possible moment doing it and then if you don’t have the best program in the world keep fixing it in between projects or during another project if the new one is easier and apologize to the customer that the first iteration didn’t have all the features/interface they wanted and offer the fixed one at a discount as an apology.
I mentioned that.
That’s true, but that’s what user testing and feedback (and tester rotating so they don’t just get “used” to the interface) is for, not to mention the support and apology I mentioned on point one.
Again, isn’t that what testing and support is for? And since your failure is the company’s failure doesn’t that mean (again, from point 1) that you should endeavor to read all the research articles and attend all the seminars about UI design you can get to if the testing isn’t working as well as it should to pick up the slack? I realize one person can only do so much, but even if everyone else is doing nothing (which, while possible, seems unlikely) that’s what prioritizing your own schedule is for. And I can’t imagine it would be bad to research it during work time even, since good design from the start should cut down on the number of iterations of the GUI and as such that time spent not coding would come out to a net time saver, even if your deadline is too close for comfort you can stagger it.
And this is why developers burn out after a few years of working like donkeys for no reward.
It SHOULD scare you. Let’s wait a few hours and compare and contrast the posts showing which posts, your optimistic and my dystopian, views are considered most realistic.
And PLEASE note that I spoke as someone with a decade or three of on-the-job experience. Fresh out of school, you are, technologically, nobody. Yeah, you have skillz that will serve you well as you grow into your job, but you are competing with guys who may not have all your skills, but who have been playing The Game for a long time, sometimes since before you were born.
Advice my daughters ignored, to their detriment: My recommendation is to take some business and accounting courses while supporting your IT courses. An IT major is truly screwed if he’s left writing any form of business software without having first taken a couple 100-level Accounting classes. (Hot Russian classmate in my first-semester Accounting course: “After the third week it was all new.” And she had a degree in USSR accounting. And was super-hot.) Do not discount what the KGB will throw at you to distract you, nor anybody else. 
ETA: Yeah, she was that hot, but her inability to grasp basic rules of accounting was hotter. Yeah, I’m a dweeb. 
Well, aside from the potential of game design I always keep open I’m not really looking into software engineering so much as (going to Doctorate) research, most likely focused in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning.
I’ll admit though, I should have known it was wrong. I’ve always had weird views of teamwork and obligation that confounded even my peers. I blame an overdose of leadership clinics and all the “if you fail you’re letting everyone down and you have to take responsibility even if you had nothing to do with it, and that goes for everyone in the group not just you. And only use the royal we, when talking about stuff the project entails.” monologues that come with it.
I read an excellent book written by the guy who designed Visual Basic, called The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. His main argument is that programmers are the last guys you’d want to design an interface. As others have mentioned, you need interface specialists.They are a completely different animal than the poor drudge who is banging away at 2 AM and eating stale pizza in order to deliver on yet another make-or-break deadline.
What is boils down to is that no one I’ve ever encountered, and we’re talking Fortune 500 companies here, is willing to pay what an application would cost to do it right. We’re talking the basics, things like user requirements, risk analysis, acceptance metrics, prototyping, and so on. The most valuable resource is time. I don’t know how many times as a project manager my boss would see me hacking away at my keyboard and demand to know why we weren’t programming yet. You know, writing code. Everything else is fluff.
Sure. But even in a very collaborative, supportive, we’re-all-in-this-together work environment – which is pretty rare – things gang aft agley.
Um, no. You should know what you’re doing and design a good first-draft interface before the users or testers ever lay eyes or fingers on it. If you depend on users to guide color choices and font types/sizes and where the buttons go, then you are sunk before you begin. Can users offer input to tweak, adjust, improve? Sure. Can they do the design for you by offering individual suggestions as a result of testing? No. Lord no. Please.
I can’t even begin to respond to this. I have lost all speech.
deep breath
OK, here’s an attempt.
In this world, people generally have talents and inclinations and areas of interest. Some people have broad talents, have a good left-brain, right-brain balance, and have fairly deep knowledge in lots of areas. That’s rare though. Your typical programmer does not necessarily have the talent or skill to worry about what they often see as “cosmetics” nor do they have the interest or time to learn. Likewise, some one who understands UIs and human psychology enough to design a truly user-friendly interface doesn’t necessarily have the talent or knowledge to build the back-end, and has no desire to do so. You see, people tend to specialize, and often to create something as complex as a good computer application you need a team of people with different talents. It’s called specialization. Not every clothing designer can sew well, not every expert seamstress can design a good dress. I may be an excellent cook but don’t have a sophisticated/creative palate, whereas not all supertasters and adventurous eaters can boil water. Most companies worry more about the back end than the front end. Period. The End.
I’ve worked in a place Jragon would understand as a programmer. Unfortunately for him, it was the Air Force, and the unit I was in closed a few years after I got out. We had, and followed, a robust process. We required constant communication between the programmers and the users. We had two different test groups, one in our unit, one in the user’s. We considered ourselves a team working for the same goals. What we released always met the requirements we said it did. We documented everything.
We still had really crappy user interfaces. Tell me you’ve seen a good interface that was written in FORTRAN
I’ve never seen anything like it in the real world though. Most applications in the real world are built to make a process cheaper than it currently is. A good interface helps, of course, but it’s often very expensive to make, and doesn’t provide that much benefit. Most programmers, and designers, are people who are going to work to make a living, not people performing a mission, or engaging a passion.
the company I work for has some custom software that was built by someones husband in the company. when I came onboard and started using this crap I was asked by the owner of the company what I thought’
“I Think this software is garbage, who in their right mind would pay for this crap?”
yeah it was his idea and he loves the stuff.
as an example its scheduling software…and we schedule thousands of appointments per month. to move an appointment from say 2-3 to 3-4 takes 8 mouse clicks…the same thing google calendar and Ical can do with a simple click drag and drop.
it has your time card built into it and about 50-60 employees who use it, but to get to it you have to click through 3 menus and then its 6 more clicks to get it to display your time sheet where you then have to click about a billion more times (or once per item on the sheet) then click save, the other menus and crap you have to click through are all garbage that gets used about 1% of the time.
that combined with the fact that they only buy the cheapest computers that will barely run vista (dont get me started on vista) means that hes paying hours upon hours each week for people to click and wait.