Choice Bits from Alan Cooper
I don’t take a lot of notes. I did, however, make sure to write down anything that really made me think during the sessions at Interaction 08. These are my notes from Alan Cooper’s opening keynote.
One of his major points is that “best to market” beats “first to market”. Business administrators tend to focus on “first to market” because they don’t know how to do “best to market”. He cited Sergey Brin’s philosophy—people don’t have to use a product today. It will be better tomorrow.
Always plan to throw one away.
Alan spent a lot of time talking about the relationship between designers, programmers, and management. I was especially struck by his portrayal of programmers as craftspeople. Their desire is to build something that works well. That is what gives them job satisfaction. Alan then outlined three patterns of software development.
In the first example, designers aren’t represented. Requirements are delivered from management to the programmers, who must then do it all. In the second example, designers are inserted. They receive the requirements and determine what should be built. Then the programmers can happily execute the design, building something that works well.
In the final example, Alan added what he termed “Design Engineering”, this being a role filled by senior developers that design the software architecture. The designer receives the requirements and determines what to build. Then the design engineer decides how it should be built. These two roles collaborate to insure correctness, iterating the design. Finally, programmers build it. The programmers benefit from the process because there is a clear plan. They can focus on the things they care about most: efficiency and skilled execution.
If this overview has piqued your interest, check out the video.