Human-KV Interaction

ABSTRACT

Dear KV, I've been reading your column occasionally and havent seen you address anything related to user interface design and how it can completely torque a piece of software. I happen to work as a programmer on a project for a company that sells point-of-sale software, which is a nice way of saying cash registers. The goals of the marketing people and user interface designers (we have several for our different product lines) always seem to twist the software into directions that only make it more fragile. These people ask for features that, while to a naive user might make the user interface easier to customize or use, to any of the programmers on the project its obvious that the feature in question will have a negative impact on code size, clarity, or some other nasty side effect. Several times our releases have been delayed because midstream we were asked for a feature that proved to have such a horrible side effect that it had to be removed right at the end. Sometimes these features are really just visual changes, but our system is so easy to change visually that it seems to invite the marketing and design folks to make changes just for the fun of it, as if the color of the buttons ought to be red one day, then blue the next. Is there any way to make these pests go away?

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  A. General Literature
  A.0 GENERAL

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.6 Programming Environments

  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.0 General

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.2 Installation Management