Robby on Rails

I’ve been working on a project with Graeme, and we’re spending some time cleaning up some RHTML views.

He posted an article earlier, titled, Dirty Views? Clean them up!, where he asks the following.

“I am also looking for more information on best practices with views in Rails. There doesn’t seem to be much information on the subject.”

We’re starting to re-evaluate how we approach our views and are curious what other teams are doing… especially if you have a team thats approx 1/2 designers… 1/2 developers per project. We’ll be reviewing some of the other options for the View layer over the coming week(s) and welcome any suggestions/insight to this area of Rails… head over to Graeme’s blog and share your thoughts. :-)

...back in Portland after being in London and New York City for the past two weeks. It’s nice to be home. :-)

I came across this interview with Matz earlier today. It was published almost three years ago (pre-Rails)... I’m quite intrigued by what he is advocating here…

Bill Venners: You also mentioned in your ten top tips: “Be nice to others. Consider interface first: man-to-man, man-to-machine, and machine-to-machine. And again remember the human factor is important.” What do you mean by, “consider interface first?”

Yukihiro Matsumoto: Interface is everything that we see as a user. If my computer is doing very complex things inside, but that complexity doesn’t show up on the surface, I don’t care. I don’t care if the computer works hard on the inside or not. I just want the right result presented in a good manner. So that means the interface is everything, for a plain computer user at least, when they are using a computer. That’s why we need to focus on interface.

Some software people—like weather forecasters, the number crunchers—feel that the inside matters most, but they are a very limited field of computer science. Most programmers need to focus on the surface, the interface, because that’s the most important thing.

Bill Venners: You also mentioned machine-to-machine interfaces, so are you just talking about interfaces for users or also for machines?

Yukihiro Matsumoto: It’s not just user interfaces. When machines are talking to each other via a protocol, they don’t care how the other is implemented on the inside. The important thing is the proper output getting passed correctly via the proper protocol. That’s what matters.

If you have a good interface on your system, and a budget of money and time, you can work on your system. If your system has bugs or is too slow, you can improve it. But if your system has a bad interface, you basically have nothing. It won’t matter if it is a work of the highest craftsmanship on the inside. If your system has a bad interface, no one will use it. So the interface or surface of the system, whether to users or other machines, is very important.

One of things that we’re really advocating with Dialogue-Driven Development is artifact generation. Wireframes and lightweight prototypes are great for generating constructive dialogue between clients, users, and our team. We should make sure that we understand why and how users will use an interface before we worry about the code that will drive it. Too often we fall into a pattern of thinking where we’re convinced that we can build an agnostic application that has various interfaces to a central repository of business logic and data. While we strive for this during development, it really should be focused on after some initial interaction design has been planned. Of course, this is my opinion.

So, I must ask you. When you’re working with on a new project, do you focus on interface or code implementation first?

I would like to start some dialogue with all of you…

In a recent post, Jeremy Voorhis said the following about About Face 2.0 in his post announcing his Agile Book Club.

About Face 2.0 isn’t bad; it’s full of some great advice. My biggest gripes with it are the follows:

• It declares that programmers are just unfit for interaction design.
• It advocates for waterfall development.
• Cooper has a defensive tone whenever discussing his beloved discipline of interaction design.
• The web chapter is dated.

If you can get over all of those things, it is full of great ideas, specifically about working with personas, and data entry and retrieval.

I disagree with a few of these conclusions. In particular, that Cooper advocates waterfall development. I’ve been hearing a lot of developers throw the word, “waterfall” around… but why?

Take the following excerpt from this great conversation between Kent Beck, the father of XP, and Alan Cooper.

“During the design phase, the interaction designer works closely with the customers. During the detailed design phase, the interaction designer works closely with the programmers. There’s a crossover point in the beginning of the design phase where the programmers work for the designer. Then, at a certain point the leadership changes so that now the designers work for the implementers. You could call these “phases”—I don’t—but it’s working together.”[1]

I’m curious as to how anyone would consider this to resemble Waterfall, which might imply that Cooper’s approach to Interaction Design is incompatible with the principles behind the Agile Manifesto.

Dave Churchville posted an article last year titled, Agile Interaction Design?, which discussed how the role of an Interaction Designer (ID) can be compatible with Agile methodologies. “An ID team probably becomes the voice of the customer in Agile methods, and as such should be working closely with the development team as well as the users. In that sense, the ID role may be more of a liaison between customer and developer.”

So, do you think that Interaction Design as described by Alan Cooper… is compatible with the principles of the Agile Manifesto?

UPDATE It looks like this conversation was picked up on the Joel on Software discussion boards.

¹ http://www.fawcette.com/interviews/beck_cooper/page8.asp

Kevin Clark has just posted, Rails for Designers, a blog entry that gives designers a nice intro into Ruby on Rails.

I’m reminded of a post by DHH last year titled Why are designers so excited about Rails?

Teach a HTML/CSS designer RHTML or Liquid... and some SVN… and you’re in business!