Feature: User Experience in a Software Development Team

Within a software development team, most talk of creating a good User Experience (UX) usually relates to creating an intuitive user interface. In the traditional sense this means:
* the layout of the buttons,
* the ability for the application to remember contextual information, or
* the intuitive nature of a web site navigation system.
But these interfaces, although important as the face of the application, are actually only a small part of what makes up the product.

Beyond the User Interface
A software application, like an iceberg, has a great deal of its complexity in the underlying structure of a program, the object model, where there are countless different members (interfaces, methods, and properties, delegates, etc.) which transfer and transform data between objects and to and from the database. While not as visible or as glamorous as the UI these are all interfaces that have users, your colleagues, whose needs must be satisfied.

On one level these users could be considered the most important users to satisfy because the culmination of their efforts make up the finished application. Their ability to produce good software and the trade-offs they make in order to create the software will have a big influence on its character.

Consequently, the environment - and the mindset developers work in - proves crucial to their ability to produce a good overall user experience. Every effort should be taken to ensure that they are focused on creating a good quality product, not in compensating for an awkward development environment or in acquiring the contextual information that they need to complete their task from obscure code.

Creating the right environment for UX to flourish
Every developer should be encouraged to develop this mindset; one way is to ensure that you create code that enables your colleagues to interface with your code easily.

The simplest and most effective way of doing this is by naming your classes and members appropriately. As a rough guide:
* Your objects should be named clearly.
* Your objects and their members should be named so that their intention is obvious.
* Your members should exist harmoniously within scope of the class they inhabit, as well as the overall application.

When the ambiguity is taken out of the development activity, the amount of tacit knowledge needed to complete a task is diminished and the communication between team members is simplified but it's in the subsequent phases of the project when this clarity pays real dividends. Creating an object model that is clear and expressive reduces the amount of background information that has to be re-learnt and understood before starting a development task, allowing the developer to become productive quicker.

As I’ve discussed in this article, the primary benefit of adopting this approach at this point in the development team is a simpler more effective object model, but the secondary and arguably most important benefit is that it encourages and reinforces a user-centric mindset from the ground up, making it easier to integrate the user as an integral part of development lifecycle.

Matthew Goddard
UX Consultancy

Associated Link: UX Consultancy

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