03 September 2002

Ten lessons learned from Netscape's flirtation with Open Source UI development Number one is "Don't skip the design stage". Many of Peter Trudelle's lessons are basics that apply to any project. And Matthew Thomas' reply to Peter shows that there was a lot of process-related pain in that project as well. Joel Spolsky comments that geographic distance does not permit good design: It's very frustrating doing any kind of design work, architectural or UI, with a dispersed group of volunteers. Things which Matthew could have persuaded someone in person at a whiteboard in five minutes took hours of typing into Bugzilla. [...] There just isn't enough bandwidth to do good design when a team is geographically dispersed. I'm not saying it can't be done at all, but the results are vastly better when the entire team is physically in the same location. I'm convinced of this, and will never agree to do software development with a dispersed team. but Mathew isn't so sure, citing incompetence, the interface being munged by commercial requirements, and interesting notes on why free software usability tends to suck (and why it sucks, redux) instead. There's no doubt though that geographic distance can make product development more complicated (and nb geography may also introduce language or even cultural distance), but even within the office, there's a kind of motivational "distance" at work between the different disciplines of engineering, design, marketing... [via magnus] 5:02:51 PM     comments