As a UI developer, with a sound HCI background,(although still really a rookie – 16 months experience)..I am becoming increasingly disillusioned with the fall and fall of the importance of front-end development on websites. Recently, a community website project I worked on through contract was completely led by the back-end development. The ratio from programmers to UI/Graphic designers was 6:1, the programmers involved had little or no interest in what the final site would look like, the primary concern lay with getting the site ‘working’ (i.e functional) and little else. This, coupled with a complete absence of User feedback and task analysis, led to a final website which was confusing and eccentric, to say the least. I only hope this is an exception, but I am interested to hear other developers experience relating to this topic. For instance, should the more hardcore coders be encourage to get thinking about user-end issues, or should companies be encouraged to pour more resources into this area…and how do I encourage them, or justify this?
