Re: Doc Design and Conventions

["Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>]

I'm not a SW document specialist, having never worked for any company whose main 
product was software that wasn't being used to control some kind of a physical 
system, but all the companies I've ever worked for or with that produced 
software never had any "UI engineers," and used an open bug/improvement system 
in which anyone who was involved with a project was able to file a bug report or 
improvement suggestion and all were evaluated and resolved.  The tech writers 
were often some of the major UI commenters, but it wasn't considered anything 
more than part of being a member of the development team.

I think I would tend to look askance at any working environment in which writers 
(or anyone else in the development team) were either not allowed to do this or 
were expected to be the primary people responsible for doing it.  And I'd run 
like hell from one in which the writers were not considered part of the 
development team at all.

Gene Kim-Eng



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Keith Hood" <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com>
My highly subjective take on the history of tech writers' involvement in UI 
design:  In their downsizing over the years, companies got rid of all their 
usability engineers. The regular developers took over UI design but they usually 
weren't trained to pay attention to usability concerns, and they were pressured 
to get the product out the door as soon as possible.

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