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This Week in d3: 2

Posted by Fri, 20 Oct 2006 21:53:00 GMT

I missed a week… but last week, Brian wrote about one of the Principles of d3: simplicty.

“As a principle of d3, we want our client interaction to be simpler. So we want to talk about problems with our clients. We want these to be the concrete, explicit elements we dialogue about.” (read more)

Today, I asked on the Dialogue-Driven Development mailing list, “What are some elements in group interaction (clients, colleagues, users) that prevent healthy Dialogue from taking place?”

“The biggest element that I’ve seen that harms dialogue is an emotionalattachment to some idea or decision… ...When people are emotionally attached to one particular point of view, they have a difficult time making objective, rational decisions.”David Goodlad


“The biggest problem that we have is semi-literate users thinking too soon about implementation details about the solution, rather than considering the true nature of the problem instead.”James Adam

This resulted in me thinking up a new term for this horrible infection… implementitus.


“One of the biggest problems I’m continuously having to overcome is physical proximity. I’m a firm believer in kicking off a project with a face-to-face meeting, but when working remotely, and not having an on-site customer to easily communicate with your skills has a communicator must be greatly increased.”Josh Knowles


“Fortune-telling the user’s reaction.
“The user wouldn’t like this.”
“This user wants this button there.”
“That would confuse the user.”

Of course, user opinion should be critically important, but in my experience it’s often used as a veto that doesn’t have to be explained just because someone doesn’t like an idea. I’ve done this, myself.”Brasten Sager


I’m really excited to get the interact with other people who are facing the same types of obstacles that we are. Being a successful developer requires a lot of discipline and it’s our goal to enhance our communication skills… so that we can reach shared meaning with our colleagues, clients, and users.

If developer to client, developer to developer, or developer to user interaction is important to you… come talk with us in the Dialogue-Driven Development project.

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