I think the best thing for the user is…

After hearing this sentence too many times from developers I start to wonder do they need us? I guess they don’t. User interaction experts just make their life more complicated. So who need us? The users of course, and this certainty is caused by the programmers ideas and solutions to interaction issues. By no means I take the programmers’ work lightly, nor encouraging not to listen to them.

Many times programmers vision is limited by their knowledge, experience and the desire to experience with new technology. The latest example is three state check box in a web application (MSDN, example). For those of you who say three states is normal considering check, not checked and disabled, I address here an additional state (that makes four states total) which can be described as slightly checked. My opinion is that option should be deprecated until some one will explain me why it is needed.

Any way listening to the programmers is good, especially when working on a detailed design of the interaction. The analytic nature of their work and the ambition to identify stages, actions, event and responses can discover missed interaction scenarios. The more detailed the design is it is simpler for the programmer to understand and implement the interaction correctly. But this raises a problem, the user interaction expert becomes the writer of a major part of the system specification document. This sounds good from the point of view of user centered design (UCD), but such a tight integration requires the UI expert to be a system analyst as well. This is not good…

Many UI experts basic education is computer science, but as this is a multidisciplinary profession some are graphic designers or from the field of cognitive science. That makes a mess, especially when talking to a programmer, in some cases they even don’t share the same vocabulary. Then the programmer say “I think the best thing for the user is…”