Artistic Reality

Sometimes when you are dealing with the high politics of a system that might have major impact on an industry, you may run into a wall of confusing interests. How did the status quo come about, what are all the vested interests, if you change a practice what else might be affected? I find that when I have allowed my hips to be buried in the muck, first I doodle for about fifteen minutes, and then I set myself down and draw a Reality diagram. This is a concise way to describe, on a single sheet of paper, all the psychics impinging on a project. It is comprised of five quick sketches, each a slightly different flavor, describing various elements and relationships surrounding the projects "reality."


The first diagram of Physical space, shows a hypothetical activity that encapsulates a typical event ranging across a variety of actors. Man A stabs man B, who seeks help from doctor C. Okay relax it was an accident. B works at factory D.


The second diagram shows Ethical Space, basically who has spiritual "claims" on others for their actions (or omissions).


The third diagram shows Contractual Space: the understandings, paper, and legal relationships between the parties.


This fourth diagram is more of a list, a high level classification of the types of information each party keeps that are relevant to your system.


The last chart shows Financial space: simply how the money flows between the parties. So now you've got a piece of paper in front of you that succinctly summarizes the entire Reality surrounding your project. Does this solve anything? No. Does this tell you what to do next or make your life any easier? Probably not.

Yet I have found that this diagramming is an invaluable tool, because it shows you why things are the way that they are, the nature of their balance, and the interplay of the forces between them. It frees you from the muck because it shows you the difference between the hard and the soft limits. So unstick yourself: get real!

Artistic Meta

With marching orders and a vague foggy vision of where you are headed, you are ready to create the Meta-Project. Not the project itself, the Meta-Project enwraps the actual project creating an environment for it to succeed. The Meta-Project is more of a thought process, something you keep to yourself, in your heart, to guide you to a successful completion. In an earlier post I described how to resolve the utility-cost-speed triad; this is the other half of the mental preparations required to launch a project.

To start you need to create the tone, the environment under which your project will proceed. Sometimes you will need to be methodical and professional, moving slowly with each step well-documented. You may need to get management reaffirmation and written approval all along the way. At other times you may need to create a blender, a whir of activity that juggles six balls at once. You may need to generate enough excitement that your coworkers get overwhelmed with enthusiasm and complete the project for you. I can not give you guidance as to the appropriate tone for you to succeed in your project -- you need to use your intuition, foresight, and knowledge of the culture at your company to determine what will work in your environment.

I usually find it helpful at this point to sketch out figures of my thoughts. One such drawing is a graph of "risk space" -- along one axis I label Risk, and along the other I label Volatility. I then draw circular regions that indicate representations of where each design option would land. Some projects are risky because they have a high probability of technical failure: this may be due to an increased complexity brought about by the interaction of multiple layers of software, or perhaps because the development language itself presents certain challenges of learning and implementation.

Some projects are risky for political reasons: they might for example shed light on why certain business units of a company are performing poorly, or the software may replace the functions of another system that already keeps several staff members gainfully employed. Some projects may be risky because the goals are ill-defined, or no single person has enough authority to assure completion, or the people in authority are themselves insecure and may not be around at the end of the project for support when you need them.

Volatility is intended as an estimation hedge. The risk for any one implementation may run from low to high: if all the factors are well known then the volatility should be low. On some projects you will get the gut feeling that you are in for a barrel of surprises however, where most of the problems will surface during development or after implementation. In this case the volatility is high. "Type 3" projects tend to be volatile, because you can expect to incorporate new technologies and deal with new staff as the project develops. Some small projects can be surprisingly volatile, not for anything inherent in the design process itself, but because of business uncertainty. If the corporation is undergoing severe changes, then smaller projects tend to get swept under the rugs and scrapped easily.

By preparing yourself thoroughly mentally before a project gets under way you will glide through all of the challenges that it presents.

The Art in Courtesy

A typical windows form has tons of small visual cues that you can leverage to provide ultimate courtesy to your client. To start with consider the lowly mouse-pointer icon. You can of course change this to different icons under different circumstances to signal various conditions. Always change the pointer to an hourglass if your process is running a thread that disables user input. Change it to a question mark when they hover over a label, and then provide help about the field when they click on that label.

Use the status area strip at the bottom of a form to show messages about the internal tasks you are performing. These should be detailed enough to provide helpful information should you need to debug a client's problem during operation.

A mouse has two buttons usually... take advantage of this by providing right-click context menus where appropriate.

When you expect data to be entered in a specific format, overlay a graphic example (mm/dd/yy).

Make the effort to disable buttons, checkboxes, menu items, and fields when they are logically unavailable. If a field on a form is required for entry before the submit button can be pressed, then that button should not enable until after the required field has been entered.

Always indicate which fields are required in a manner that is both clear and consistent, yet discreet.

Take advantage of the title bar: it can show both variable words and an icon, and these display when your application is minimized.

When a user hovers over a field, they may be confused about what to enter. You may pop up a short callout of information, or even a callout help-button that will display a sub form.

Finally on any operation that require extensive processing time, display a progress bar showing the estimated time to completion. Run the long task in a background thread so that the user interface can still be moved or minimized. Provide a button to cancel any long-running operation.

Correctly handling all the small visual cues requires quite a bit more effort during development, but doing so marks the difference between a hack and a professional developer.