Larry Constantine
Feedback and Commentary on the Interview

David,

A comment on Larry's remarks regarding Nielsen's new book. Larry says about the book, "...but like the Web itself, the book is somewhat chaotic and redundant. One is left both a little overwhelmed and somewhat unsure about where to start and what to do next in designing the next Web site." It is true that the book reads like a Jacob Nielsen presentation, but in Nielsen's defense, he states in the preface of the book that this is just the first of two books. In Nielsen's words, "This first one is about the 'what' of good websites, and the second book is about the 'how.'"

A key point made by Larry in the interview is that "user interface design is not rocket science." I am not sure that method, discipline, and conceptual tools will be enough to overcome what Larry describes as the biggest challenges - the politics.

Jim Avery

I purchased Constantine's book (through your site) and have been delighted.

However I must take some measure of disagreement with Mr. Constantine regarding his disagreement with Alan Cooper.

Based on 40+ years working exclusively on military developments - specifically C3I - (Command, Control and Communications plus Intelligence) I can tell you that by the time a new, young developer has properly interpreted a "spec requirement" doing his own "design" we have still invested many man-hours of "military" teaching - and we still have endless "but-whys". And that doesn't even take into account what I call the basic HCI "reqs".

It is far quicker, cheaper and easier -on everyone - to employ professional Use Case Modelers who have long-term Concept of Operations knowledge coupled with the unique ability to observe users and quickly sketch the case - or at least ask the right questions and posses that "design ability" that is so difficult to teach.

All that not withstanding I agree with Mr. Constantine that at least educating all the developers in UCD and useability or usefulness principles can not but help the process. I believe that Mr. Constantine stated the problem correctly in the opening of his article when he stated that, (edit.) "management IS the process". Controlling cost and delivering increasingly faster, more useful defense systems is our goal - not satisfying the political ego of a developer.

I trust Mr. Constantine will accept this criticism of his article in the spirit of comradie with which it is intended as I think his work will become very significant as we attempt to wring "more bang for the buck" out of our national defense systems development process. His book resides on my desk and is frequently pointed out and offered to folks that ask "but why...?".

Thank you Mr. Constantine and Ms. Lockwood.

Sincerely,
Keith Pulver

Ben Kovitz wrote:

Wonderful interview, David! Really interesting, right-to-the-essentials insight into Larry Constantine's thinking--and it's stimulating for user-interface design, too.

I found the sections nearer the beginning more interesting than the later sections. Especially interesting was the part where Constantine compares his views to Cooper's, about how to solve the problem of programmers making bad UIs. I've recently come around to Constantine's view on this: educate the programmers rather than stratify the development team. I've had success with stratification (i.e. having one person do the UI and other people implement it), but I think it adds too much overhead and slows down the try-something-and-improve-it cycle. If you have more material on this, and on LC's ideas on UI design and process, I'd like to see it (perhaps at the expense of some of other material, if you're worried about length).