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Managing Systems Development 101: A Guide to Designing Effective Commercial Products & Systems for Engineers & Their Bosses∕CEOs
By
James T. Karam
James T. Karam
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ISBN-10:
0791802582
No. of Pages:
140
Publisher:
ASME Press
Publication date:
2007

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are also now an integral part of most products. Their design involves a mixture of artistic and stylistic preference combined with technical traits that ease the product's usage by beginners while still allowing proficient users access to all the bells and whistles your product provides.

GUI design should be viewed as a religious preference, not technical. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) staff first acquainted the author with this perspective of religious bias in engineering. There are still quite legitimate advantages and disadvantages with many of the design choices you have to make, but do not carry on like there truly is a right and a wrong way. They are mostly just different ways.

For the younger reader, DEC totally dominated the minicomputer market with their VAX's in the seventies and eighties. This perspective arose in a DEC presentation in the eighties comparing the benefits of the three dominate networking protocols at that time: CSMA∕CD (best known as Ethernet or IEEE 802.3), GM's MAP (token bus or IEEE 802.4), and IBM's Token Ring (IEEE 802.5). Even though DEC was solely in the Ethernet camp, their point was that each had its strengths and weaknesses and all could be used to create quite useful networks, ergo it really comes down to a religious preference. The author was biased in favor of MAP, but Ethernet won out for economic reasons (see, to this day, the bias remains). By the late eighties, one could buy Ethernet adapters for 1∕10 the cost of the others.

Clickable Mockups, Often in Lieu of Specs
Admittedly Biased Design Practices
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