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Alan Cooper has an interesting piece in his book "About Face" regarding multiple interfaces for the same feature. It's against all modern design principles (not that I would call him modern).
I can understand the reasoning however if your product is aimed at a wide array of people you have limited options. Take cameras for example. Soccer Mom wants to point her camera at junior, take a picture and expect it to look good. Someone that understands the advanced features like shutter speed etc. is going to want to take advantage of those features. The product needs to meet the demands of both and the only way you can do that is with two interfaces.
I can understand the reasoning however if your product is aimed at a wide array of people you have limited options. Take cameras for example. Soccer Mom wants to point her camera at junior, take a picture and expect it to look good. Someone that understands the advanced features like shutter speed etc. is going to want to take advantage of those features. The product needs to meet the demands of both and the only way you can do that is with two interfaces.
Alan specifically refers to designing interfaces for the beginner(soccer mom, in your example), intermediate, and expert users. Pay attention to his statements on how beginners impact the bell curve at a much more different rate than intermediate and expert users. Intermediate users never drop off (relatively) compared to beginners or experts. This is why a statistical analysis only tells a portion of the story and designing to a statistical model, alone, is not sufficient.
Why are so many software engineers bad at spelling and writing? (the OP's use of "their" instead of "there")
I don't place much value on the job title software engineer vs. software developer. Lots of companies do not make a distinction between them. Software "engineer" is a relatively new creation. It wasn't that long ago that the only job title was "programmer."
I have been in the for profit (vendor) software business since 1989. There are so many aspects to software development to address - all affected by the type of software, the expected longevity of it, the consequence of poor quality, the competitiveness of the market, etc.
Product managers exist because software developers are often awful at producing software that anyone other than themselves will like or use.
Management shouldn't be the bad guy. They should be the force that balances the various issues at play and makes decisions, which is often just breaking ties.
I see, by your post I thought you were inferring he advocated for one interface.
The irony is that Cooper learned all this while creating MS Visual Basic. So long ago, yet so relevant. Microsoft has always had the best IDEs (and still do), but VB was the best of them.
If product managers can break the process, then you aren't agile. This needs to be escalated to your management. Management needs to set expectations. It's the technology team that chooses what gets done and when. The product manager's only responsibility is to write stories and prioritize them.
Yeah, I know they shouldn't be able to break process. But I've been to more than 2 companies where they not only can, but often do. Or upper management totally breaks process by pushing code into production without being tested simply because they want to deliver right away. Trust me, these stories are more typical than you think. I've seen shops where fire fighting was an everything thing, with Product Managers waiting in the cut to add new features. And unfortunately, most development managers have been total wimps when it came to standing up to product and program managers. The ones who do, get shown the door in some cultures.
Some of it has to do with the complexity, size and scope of modern software.
For example, take Windows.....a huge operating system with many different facets.
When Windows gets released.....man, you know there is no way they have all the bugs worked out.
My current Toshiba is a nightmare......finally getting some of the bugs worked out.
Or forgetting a period at the end of a sentence while criticizing someone else's grammar.
Einstein didn't have a program suggesting the wrong word as the correct spelling, either.
I don't like to make excuses, but a dropped period is not the same as the misuse of a word.
Does anyone here think the OP can be compared to Einstein? He may be a fine person and intelligent too. But Einstein was one in a million.
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