Sublime

The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web (New Riders Press, 2002), an excellent book by Jesse James Garrett.

There’s a well-established theory of product innovation called the stage-gate model that can help us understand how this works. This model was popularized in 1986 by Robert Cooper in his book, Winning at New Products. It lays out a series of development stages, punctuated by decision-making “gates” that let the winning ideas pass through.

We want to design components that are self-contained: independent, and with a single, well-defined purpose (what Yourdon and Constantine call cohesion [YC86]). When components are isolated from one another, you know that you can change one without having to worry about the rest.

The entrepreneur is the dreamer, the visionary, and the creative mind. • The manager is the person who thinks about return on investment (ROI), near-term success, and productivity. • The technician gets the work done. She follows the manager’s guidance and is concerned about today’s success.