Building Successful Software Teams

picasso in your software teamAll too often we see products that don’t make the transition from good to great.

Products with great potential let down not by a lack of innovative features but from a lack of user accessibility. Today alternatives are just a Google away and it is not sufficient for a product to be technically outstanding, it must be intuitive, low fuss and easy to use. A development team must nail the user interface and user experience so consumers can access the technology. I firmly believe many companies are still missing the mark here, simply because their team composition is stacked heavily with “scientific and technical talent”. A balanced team is in my opinion critical to success.

The challenge then is to ensure technical teams and managers hire talent from a range of intelligence pools, don’t hire just tech-heads (your Einstein’s).

Where to start? Howard Gardner suggests that there are multiple, unique forms of intelligence; he identified these eight:

  • Logical-Mathematical – scientific and technical talent;
  • Verbal-Linguistic – the ability to use words and language effectively;
  • Interpersonal – the ability to interact effectively with people and teams;
  • Intrapersonal – self-reflective and self–understanding tendencies and talents;
  • Visual-Spatial – imaginative and artistic talent;
  • Bodily-Kinesthetic – physical talent and dexterity;
  • Musical – the ability to create music; and
  • Naturalistic – an ability to manage and relate to the natural world.

Here is a great article “Innovation for Innovators”  covering team composition and what is now becoming the stereotypical comparison of Apple vs. Microsoft. I believe it should get you thinking. Get a few Picasso’s in your team and make that transition from good to great.

Graphical User Interface Design – How to get it right (Part 1) – Use Colour

Use colour in user interfaces

User interface design tips:

  1. Use colour, nice colour (engineer defaults like grey are not friendly)
  2. Multi-media and artist types can provide good advice on colours to use
  3. Users are people, think about how you are communicating with them

So why do so many companies get graphical user interface (GUI) design so wrong?

I attribute a large part of  my success directly to two key factors:

  •  Working with a great team (they can build anything I can think up)
  • Functional user interface design (building things real people can use)

One of the biggest mistakes I see on a regular basis is where companies bring together a group of super smart people and say “Here’s a piece of work, go for it” expecting to get something miraculous and assuming those smart people know exactly what to do because they have been given a task (sometimes even with requirements). Now I am not saying this can’t work, what I am saying is you typically get the solution you are after with a user interface designed to be used by Engineers. Now this is ok if your target market is Engineers, but there aren’t too many companies making money selling software to Engineers other than Microsoft.

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© Copyright John Wiese