MUSEing

For some reason, I meet people every day who don’t agree with my MUSE framework or at least implicitly have a different priority framework in their minds. Usually it looks like this:

“Let us conceive, specify, develop, bugfix and release the product, and then ask the marketing guys to market it”. Well, what if we first ask marketing, what topics can bring us the cheapest leads and then conceive the product around them, or at least not against them?

“Solution A is better from the usability standpoint than solution B, therefore we should do A”. Well, B is better for motivation, because it looks more beautiful, and beauty sells. I don’t care if something is easy to use, if it looks so ugly that nobody would want to use it.

“So does this bug prevents users from using the feature, or it is just some optics, and the functionality is all in place and working?” Well, users first needs to have a reason to use our product, second must be able to understand the product. Unless these two requirements are satisfied, it doesn’t matter if the functionality is working. It is different from, say, enterprise software, where users are in the work setting and have to use the software. In the entertainment market, nobody has to read the book, listen the song, or watch the movie to the end. Or use our web site.

“MVC is a great idea, because it allows us to decouple logic from view. Let’s quickly find and use some MVC framework for HTML5!” Yes, MVC is a great idea for enterprise software, because it makes UI easier to test, allows designers and developers to work in parallel, and provides reusable components in a very natural and effortless way. But one of the MVC drawbacks is that you can easily hit a performance issue in the UI, because this architecture prevents you from squeezing 100% of the performance from the UI technology. Besides, HTML5 MVC frameworks often wrap or abstract away DOM objects and events, and therefore make it complicated to define exactly, what is shown to the user. Another MVC drawback is that it helps you to believe that reusing exactly the same UI components overall in the app is always a good idea, because hey it is good for implementation and good for usability. But a seductively looking beautiful design is more important. Even if it looks a little different on different screens.

And sometimes it is quite hard for me to understand these opinions, because MUSE sounds for me so natural and logical that I can’t imagine any other consistent priority framework.

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