Developers’ tools are designed from the bottom up, a term
Pizka and Bauer [8] used to indicate that technology drives the
requirements. The approach might be phrased as “We can do
X, therefore we will give the user the option to do X.”
Conversely, a top-down approach is built from and adapts to
meet user requirements. Pizka and Bauer also noted that a user
is more likely to adapt to the system if it is constructed as
bottom-up. Manual editing by developers, even when a tool
exists, may be a form of adaptation.
Pizka and Bauer go on to describe the shift from bottomup
to top-down design experienced by the gaming industry in
the 1990s. This refocus on an improved user interface led to
the explosive high-end gaming market we have today, but it
was not without pain. They noted that otherwise excellent
software failed because the interface did not meet the
expectations of increasingly demanding users. They also noted
that some successful games required significant interface
improvement to keep pace with the state of the art