Jason Butler

I work across research, product, design and the technical detail underneath them, usually on operational software whose users already understand their own work far better than the software does.

Most of what I do comes down to one question — where should each kind of complexity live, so that the people who have to carry it can actually manage it?

Most of the software I work on is operational: it sits in the middle of work people already know how to do, and it is the part of that work nobody chose. When it goes badly it is rarely because of a bad screen — it is because complexity that belongs somewhere else, in the data or the process or with the people who know the domain, has ended up with whoever is standing in front of the software at the moment they can least afford to carry it. So I go and watch the work happen before anyone settles what to build, and I stay with it afterwards, through the models, the prototypes and the technical detail, because that is where it gets decided who carries what.

If that is the kind of work you have going on, I would like to hear about it — email me at [email protected].

One project is written up in full as Core — Eastman's Paint Protection Film Installer Software. See the rest of the work.