The Butt Ugly Weblog

Bowling for User Interfaces

Saw the movie. Highly, highly recommended for everyone - it is a movie that makes you laugh, cry, and feel very somber about certain things; and asks a lot of important questions.

I managed to drag a couple of friends I had not seen in ages to see the movie with me. Afterwards we sat in a nearby cafe and talked for hours. A good conversation, and it made me wonder what really is the connection between User Interface design and ExtremeProgramming. A lot of XP folks do not understand design, or UI design in particular, but I think the problem lies with seeing XP as the tool instead of a philosophy. You can't really force UI design into the XP mold; instead, you have to take XP and apply it into UI design - in effect, form XUID - eXtreme User Interface Design. Just do what XP did to programming: do only the good stuff, and do it in extreme ways (code review is good; so use pair programming to do constant review, etc). The same principle should be applied to UI design - just take the good stuff, and do it in an extreme way. It should work.

XUID should also solve the problem of providing good user stories to XP programmers; once you have the UI design in place, the user stories are there - all of the use cases, and ready-designed user interfaces should provide you with enough user stories to start planning. And a good UI designer accompanying the client should be able to articulate the real user needs much better than just the client.