[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Turn Around Time On Experimentation (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants)

[Adam Martin]

On 10/03/07, Sean Howard <squidi at squidi.net> wrote:
> "John Buehler" <johnbue at msn.com> wrote:
> > Garage efforts DO make progress on depth so long as they stick with text.
>
> I think you are on to something, but I'm not sure you exactly understand why.
>
> It's not the text really that's doing it. It's the fact that the turn
> around time on experimentation is quicker. For instance, I recently
> decided to throw out the GUI for a tool I'm working on and replace it

>From personal experience of long years of writing GUI's and GUI libs
I'm afraid I disagree; I think there are reasons that people make more
progress with text, but that turnaround time isn't the main one. I
used to have problems similar to those you described, but once I
(eventually - it wasn't hard, it just took me a long time to get
there) properly understood the mental models that underlay the GUIs I
was working with, and changed the object models (or equivalent in
non-OO langs) to suit, the turnaround time both for major (wide) and
fundamental (deep) changes to GUIs became vanishingly small.

My vague, unscientific conclusion was that the biggest problem is
simply that the vast majority of programmers (and hence teachers,
courses, and programmer-teams) still haven't really learnt how/why
GUIs work conceptually. But I've long had a pet peeve about how much
of the really useful HCI research routinely gets by the development
community, sometimes for many many years, so that conclusion may be
personal bias more than anything else :).

Adam