“When can my boss test drive the application?”

IT Magazine – November 2007

Business leaders everywhere have started caring less and less about how IT guys build an application. All they want to know, early, is what they can expect in their whole experience with the application.

You guessed right. If we were able to have them ‘interact’ with the application even before writing code, they would be more than happy to actually ‘freeze’ their expectations and live up to their word of accepting what we deliver.

What I realise, rather grudgingly, is that it would actually help even us immeasurably, to be able to deliver what we promise. For over a decade now, we’ve been hearing about how look and feel are so important to any software application. IT purists are seemingly out of their depth in this particular area; they relegate it to being the work of graphic designers or, at best interaction designers.

Thinking of look and feel as an end-of-the-pipeline ‘cosmetic’ enhancement is a blunder of gigantic implications. There is something intrinsic—which tells me that beauty is never skin deep—especially about the ‘feel’ part, which requires a paradigm shift.