[fairpx]

Wonderful article and inspiring person!

I recently came across this talk of her, and highly recommend watching it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlb77dDHIXQ she explains a bit about the history of her work.

One of the main reasons I find her so inspiring is that her work clearly shows why adding a great designer to a great team of engineers can result in ever lasting impact.

As a designer myself, I work with teams of engineers (mostly in the B2B SaaS Space [1]) who write great software but don't have the skills to design a delightful experience for their users. It's a shame there are still too many teams of talented engineers out there who don't see the importance of great design.

[1] http://fairpixels.pro

[jcadam]

Indeed. I'm a software engineer in the defense industry, and there has never been budget for a designer on any contract I've worked on. So you end up with interfaces designed by engineers who hate doing UI work. Which is how you get big panels of identical gray buttons and layouts that make no sense (or put another way, some of these government systems make the Eclipse IDE look like the work of a UI/UX genius). Also, some of the more recent and publicly embarrassing incidents of UI-driven operator error :)

A few times I've said (well, not these exact words), "Give that UI to me, I may not be a professional designer or even an experienced front-end developer, but at least I care about making something usable." I was actually told once that I had to scrap my interface and re-do it, because it made the rest of the product look bad by comparison.

As an aside, I think you provide an obviously valuable service, wish I had come across it before I had done the UI for my current project :)