Comments on: Designing beyond the surface layer

By: James Christie

James Christie — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:57:37 +0000

Hi Anders – I didn’t spot your reply for a while. It’s disappointing if the idea of separability is living on amongst UX designers.

Do you think that designers who think this way do so because they don’t know any better, or do they have some theoretical and academic underpinning?

Something that surprised me was the amount of heavyweight academic work that went into trying to justify it in the 80s and 90s. Do you feel that this work, by the likes of Edmonds, Hartson & Hix, and Green still has credibility? Or is it simply a matter of designers being reluctant to move on from a mental model with which they feel comfortable, and not having been exposed to more effective approaches?

By: Anders

Anders — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 13:47:53 +0000

Hi James – I wish it were true that the UI and the underlying functionality no longer are seen as separate. In my experience, I have found the opposite to be true. Too designers are focusing solely on the surface layer, thinking of what is happening under the hood as some black box best left for developers to think about. So, in my opinion, the fallacy of separateness is alive and well in the UX design community, very much to its detriment IMO.

Hi Ulf – would love to hear how things go if you should happen to apply some of the ideas above, which btw really are not my original ideas, but rather a common practice among Agile teams, in which the focus tends to be much more on the underlying code and less on the UI, and starting with a command line version is not uncommon, at least in my experience.

By: Ulf

Ulf — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:50:27 +0000

I really like the idea to transcribe user experience requirements and system processes into a simple command-line interface. Not sure how practicable/helpful it actually is, but will give it a go as about I’m about to start with a process-heavy application project.

By: James Christie

James Christie — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:25:39 +0000

Interesting post. I wrote a Master’s dissertation a couple of years ago that, amongst other things, looked at why UX professionals had been so ineffective at getting their ideas across to software engineers.

One of the points I argued was the same one you made; that too often they’d focussed on the surface and ignored the guts of the application. I rubbished the notion that the interface was “separable” from the functionality, and argued that this illusion had marginalised UX.

I thought the idea of separability had been discredited. It’s interesting to see you feel the need to argue against it still. All too often ideas take root in academia then get ditched over time as people gain a deeper, or more sophisticated, understanding of the subject. Meanwhile they’ve taken root in the outside world and the academics can lose sight of the fact that outdated ideas are still guiding practitioners. Is this another case?