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Subject:Re: Doc Design and Conventions From:Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Sun, 1 Nov 2009 09:33:49 -0800
That sounds right to me.
Not having trained UI designers on the development team is a false
economy, but that's the software business for you. An old coworker had
a story from the late 80s / early 90s about when the VP of development
at Sybase decided to save money by laying off the whole QA team.
On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 8:23 AM, Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
> I think the evolution of tech writers from having no influence on UI design to being part of the process is accidental. For a long time, nobody else was paying real attention to it.
>
> 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.
>
> Tech writers were the users' advocates by accident, because tech writers had to actually face the UIs on a regular basis. The developers didn't *use* the UIs they made, they just slapped them together and got back to the "real" work of trying to make sure the backend functions could communicate with the database. Tech writers had to handle the UI extensively enough so they could document what it really did, so they were they only ones inside the companies who felt the pain of bad UI design. ...
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