(read this and imagine me speaking 200 kph with spittle flying from my lips while coffee spills from my mug as I gesture violently.)
"Waiter, I'll have one of whatever he's having."
Well said, spittle and venom included. I've been on both sides of the hideous trainwreck caused by these prototyping exercises, where the Suits try their hand at designing software. But I assure you, evil can be accomplished with naught but a dry-ink marker:
One day I was working in my cube (circa 1996) and the head of marketing plops down some Polaroid photos he took at his last client meeting. The photos showed a whiteboard with flowcharty looking crap. "What's this?" I ask, a sense of dread growing as I recognize the names of some of our software modules written in teeny little bad handwriting.
"We reorganized the workflow of the productl; this is the results of our JAD [joint application design] session."
"Um, you got any notes to go with these?"
"Everything's there. When can you start?"
Flash forward, out of the nightmare, to today's new nightmare. Products like Prototype Composer can so easily fall into the wrong hands, and trivialize the real design process. The only thing that stopped my boss in 1996 was that they ran out of whiteboard; what horrors will be unleased when creating the next Unusable Interface is as easy as click-n-drag?
I bet it even has wizards.
Recent Posts
