User Interface Engineering

On a discussion list I regularly read, a usability professional shared this idea:

My team has a custom of placing a large monkey (of the stuffed toy variety!) on the desk of any developer who breaks the current build with faulty code. We are thinking of introducing an equivalent badge of shame for developers who produce a particularly poor user experience or deviate wildly from our UI standards.

In my opinion, this is moving in the wrong direction.

Assuming the developer had the best of intentions (and why *shouldn’t* we assume that? — after all *we* do, don’t we?), the developer who produces a non-optimal user experience has actually done the team a favor by making obvious an important design requirement. Every time a team member bumps into a boundary of what good experience should be, we learn something we didn’t know before.

These opportunities should be rewarded as a learning experience. They should be celebrated. The team should say, “Hey! We now realize ‘x’ is important to our users! We always suspected it *could* be, but now we *know*! Thanks for helping us see that.”

I wouldn’t use a badge of shame to point out mistakes. Not if we want folks to be on our side instead of cowering every time we approach. I’d use a reward to thank the developer for teaching us something important. I’d celebrate the learning far and wide.

Of course, that’s just me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 9th, 2006 at 8:17 am and is filed under Management . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.