On engineering and design: an open letter
Microsoft Research Principal Scientist Bill Buxton calls for engineers and user-experience designers to learn to appreciate one another:
“End-user satisfaction and quality of experience need to be the fundamental pillars of any worthy company’s value system. Hence organizations must be structured in a way that tilts the odds in favor of achieving these goals. Good intentions are a start, but they are not sufficient. Appropriate tools and skills at the highest professional standards, applied according to best practice, are what’s needed.
Every project thus needs equally high levels of competence in the mutually dependent but different disciplines of engineering and UX. Professional stature is equally hard to achieve in each, and there are no simple shortcuts that let one jump from one to the other: This is no place for amateurs.”
