Re: [GMG-Devel] Feature design

[☮ elf Pavlik ☮]

Excerpts from Christopher Allan Webber's message of 2012-11-01 23:15:37 +0000:
> Heya all,
> 
> So a few weeks ago I got an email from Aaron Williamson (who had just
> implemented the collections feature at that time) about how we go about
> designing features, basically asking if we shouldn't be taking a more
> design-oriented approach to things.  To paraphrase, he observed that
> lately we've been having a "someone picks a feature and implements it
> and then afterwards Jef van Schendel runs in and tries to clean up the
> look of things" approach.  Is this really the right way?  I told him I
> was interested in discussing this, but I didn't want to interrupt the
> campaign launch.  But given that the campaign is coming near a close, I
> think it's a good time for this conversation to resurface.
> 
> In fact, we had a conversation in #mediagoblin on IRC today.  Roughly,
> what Jef and I came to were the following points:
>  - We want better planned out features, both design-wise and otherwise,
>    while simultaneously not slowing or blocking people from developing
>    things, to the extent that's possible.
>  - We do want a more designed-first development process.  However that
>    doesn't just mean graphic design, it's also technical design.
>    Rushing into a design without thinking about the user experience is
>    bad.  On the other hand, just throwing design up there without
>    thinking about the technical end isn't great either.
>  - Maybe we could add a ux-needed tag to the tracker?
>  - So what we should be doing is, for larger things especially, having
>    more conversation about how things should work beforehand.
>  - We used to do more of this... at the very least, we used to write up
>    more concrete lists of how to implement things, have ascii art mockups,
>    then real mockups, and implementions, etc.  More of that!
>  - Hopefully me coming on fulltime will help with this post-campaign:
>    I think a lot of this is keeping conversations aligned and helping
>    guide things.
> 
> Anyway, thoughts?  I'm happy to have more conversation about this here.
> Otherwise, this is a good conversation for the meeting!
>  - cwebb
I find this approach, which puts Interaction Design first, very useful:

"Behavior Driven Outside In Development Explained"
http://www.knwang.com/behavior-driven-outside-in-development-explai