Today the developers were invited to see what our new usability expert has come up with. Evidently he hired some local company to do the graphics, and somebody else to whip it up into a fancy all-signing all-dancing Flash demo. It’s all eye candy and very little substance, and it looks childish to me. But evidently all the suits and managers love it, so it’s going to go ahead. I can’t tell you what it looks like, except the back drop looks like it was copied from the default background/splash screen/packaging of a certain fruit-based cat-themed operating system that was recently released.
The fact that the interface looks like it was designed more to impress suits than to help the people who are going to use it day to day isn’t the part that sucks. The fact that it’s all going to be written in Flash semi-sucks. The fact that it’s apparently going to be designed without talking to the people who’ve been working on the program for 6 years semi-sucks. What really sucks is that the project leader is talking about either outsourcing the entire Flash part of the user interface, or hiring their Flash programmer away from them. It was left to my cow orker Rohan to speak up and say “the reason you hired good people in the first place is that with a little training we can do anything, including Flash”.