Northern Natural Gas (8/07 – 9/07)
Despite my short stay at Northern Natural, I was able to help point them in the right direction. Philip once mentioned that internal projects tend to be less profitable and less likely to have a lasting impact than commercial projects. He is, no doubt, absolutely correct. However, I enjoyed working with the team at Northern Natural… and a good team will go a long way no matter what challenges they might face.
I was pulled in to offer advice and help make some of the bigger UI decisions. More than anything, I tried to give the main architect and developers a crash-course in interaction design. I gave them lots of thoughts, but I also tried to help them understand the thought process in UI. How to approach problems from a user perspective rather than a business or technical perspective. It’s not as easy as you’d think. In fact, I believe it’s one of the keystone skills a good interaction designer brings to the table. Furthermore, I’m not certain this is the kind of skill that can be taught in a book or a series of reproducible steps.
Both Jennifer (architect) and Loren (developer) have excellent instincts concerning interaction and usability. My fear is they get too much push back from the customers and try to please the end users by adding features rather than solving problems. A subtle distinction I try to emphasize, but I don’t think it is very obvious sometimes. It’s very easy to add a widget, change a color, move a button, or create a report because a customer asks for it. It’s not as easy to fully understand the reasoning for the request and solving the root problem, which frequently has little or nothing to do with the requested feature. But, I am confident Jennifer and Loren are on the right track for now. I’ll check in every now and then just to make sure they don’t run into any trouble.