Stu: Career Direction and the Impact on End Users

Stu makes a load of really good comments on the way that technical people move further and further away from the end-user experience as they move through there career – the the detriment of the end-user:

What I see from my position as a Lotus collaboration specialist is the way enterprise support, design and engineering teams are structured. Everyone clammers for technical progression up the career ladder and to get away from 1st and 2nd line helpdesk calls (“I’ve forgotten my password”, “I’ve deleted all my emails” etc.)

But what I also see is that once up that technical career ladder there is then little attention paid to the end user tools but much attention paid to the back end server performance and functionality.

This has started to worry me somewhat as the main impact we have with our users is through the software on their desktop, they don’t care what the server is at the back end as long as it delivers what they want. I’m not putting the argument that back end engineering is trivial and unecessary but I am saying that more attention needs to be paid to the user.

Personally I’m on a journey back to the end-user experience. I’m trying to get to a position where I expect the server infrastructure to do what it should do and enable certain user experiences in a way that is usable and intuitive. Getting people to change the way they work is so much harder than changing the technology.