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Lots of comments here, none about the core of the issue as I see it. OP and OP's manager allowed "Alpha" to design the UI, and then to state that the mocks wer
by csours 6y ago
Lots of comments here, none about the core of the issue as I see it.
OP and OP's manager allowed "Alpha" to design the UI, and then to state that the mocks were the specification.
There's no shorter road to frustration than allowing UI mocks as a specification. UI mocks as a talking point are great; UI mocks as a spec are cancer mixed with broken glass. See [0] for some discussion from yesterday.
Words in a spec are abstract, but pictures are concrete. People get fixated on pictures. People also fall in love with their own creation. Allowing the customer to create the mocks almost guarantees that they will not be reasonable about them. Not only are they in love with their ideas, they're also in love with their imagined implementation.
I get it! Imagining the implementation is my favorite part of software! For someone with lower introspection and empathy it can feel like an attack when someone wants to change the thing you've fallen in love with.
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23837406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23837406
- geon 6y ago> People also fall in love with their own creation. That was exactly what happened! I have used those exact words when talking about it. > Allowing the customer to create the mocks almost guarantees that they will not be reasonable about them. Oh. I wish I had known that. Any other examples you can share?
- csours 6y agoI work on mainly company internal projects, so not exactly equivalent. I had two projects shortly after transitioning from tech support to test where the pictures of the UI was the specification. After having a terrible experience on both of them, there was another project where the "owner" wanted to give us drawings of how the screens should look. We let them make the drawings, but we did not track them as requirements or specifications. It went all right, not great. I've worked on other projects where we had an actual UX designer, and those went much better. UX is not taken very seriously by many people in tech, but it's our equivalent of industrial design.