reesesWeb

Hilarious meeting at work today. If I work with you, and you read this, I apologise as much as I am capable.

Our founder is definitely of the "ooh, bright and shiny!", easily distracted, type. He also operates under the sometimes-hilarious, often-frustrating delusion that all we need is the right product to make us an attractive acquisition or investment target. He's always coming up with a new product idea, which is fantastic in and of itself, but deeply flawed for a few reasons:

• He never thinks of a 'prototype user'. He always builds a tool based on the argument that "these features would be cool." Never once does he think about the products that should be built to satisfy the needs of any person out in the Real World. Not even when you ask him directly.
  
• Because he's easily distracted, he thinks about the two or three main points. He never thinks about the details. Never.
  
• Because of the last item, he really, really believes that his prototypes are just about ready for production deployment. They don't need to pass through Engineering, they just need someone to put on a finishing touch or two.

Needless to say, this is the cause of 90% of our problems, as management has, in the past, taken his fantasy-spinning at face value. The other 10% is poor motivation, bad timing, etc. Those aren't real numbers, but the proportion is that unbalanced.

Anyway, we had a demo today of a few items that he has brought to a prototype point. The first was pretty cool, but true to form, he had a confusing interface, which we argued about for a half hour. A half hour, and it has three logical steps! Do one thing, then do another, then the machine does something for you and tells you the result. (I can't say what it does, or what it does after that, or what it does to finish.) Anyway, there's a logical extension of our application workflow that dictates that after the first two steps, each consisting of very simple "do this now, I am bob,"-type stuff, the chain of events is very well structured. But somehow, Captain Crackhead has decided that he wants to do it another way, damn anyone else, and he's going to bother the user with a barrage of dialog boxes. It took a bloody half hour to argue him down from doing so!

What I find ludicrous is that our UI people have no concept of simple rules of UI design. Simple terminology such as affordances, etc., have no meaning to them, and they're arguing from positions of expertise. It doesn't seem to matter that everyone does a particular thing in one way, or even that we do it in that one way everywhere else -- if they want to do it this way, they're going to, gosh darn it, and you're an idiot for disagreeing!

It's tough to argue with someone who has pushed millions of dollars into the company, and the realisation of whose initial vision is the purpose of the company. One thing I hate about working in this industry is the notion that most decisions have to be made by consensus. That is, if someone really isn't qualified to partake in a discussion, it is somehow incumbent upon you to educate them up to a reasonable level so that they can even understand your objections. Sometimes, I just want to say,"The decision is mine to make as Chief Architect, and I'm telling you to do it this way. I'm not going to waste fifteen minutes to explain to you why this should be built this way."

Woof! This meeting lasted through about two hours of this kind of crap, and it's not a unique experience. I remember one gig I had while consulting a few years ago, where the management team argued for a half hour over whether labels should have following colons before text entry boxes! Apparently, people like to feel they have input into the creative process, but aren't willing to argue more than thirty minutes.

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