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The New Link Between Designer and Developer
Scott Kinder writes "Ryan Stewart of ZDNet discusses the importance of the workflow between designers and developers. Both Adobe and Microsoft have a lot at stake in their respective software projects. Given how important experience is in making software, ensuring that it is easy for designers and developers to work together is more important than ever." From the article: "The key here is going to be the workflow between designers and developers and making sure that the tools support both types of content creators. Creating world class RIAs simply will not be possible without an efficient workflow between the two areas. Adobe has focused a lot on incorporating Adobe and Macromedia products, making sure that designers can easily move between both companies software. But they haven't quite perfected the designer/developer workflow, and I think Microsoft has a bit of a head start here. The Expression Suite seems built from the ground up to work well with their developer tools. The question will be whether or not designers will use these new tools."
The whole idea of increasing feedback between users and developers is total bullshit: developers have more important things to do than explain why it's a bad idea to implement xy in the next release.
I've worked as a developer in both software that people download and more recently custom software developed for a single client, and there's one thing that hasn't changed in either model: the customer is *never* right. Or at least, so close to never that it rounds down to nothing.
I agree 100% that there needs to be a good system in place for developers to receive feedback from users, but in most cases it's best as a one way flow. Developers need to see what needs to be done first, but end users don't really need to see what will happen next. Also, user's feature requests almost certainly never, ever, *ever* will happen for one simple reason: it takes five seconds to request a feature, and five days to implement it. When combined with the fact that feature requesters outnumber feature implementers by *several thousand to one*, it's pretty easy to see why that's an impossible situation (and that doesn't even take into account the fact that most customers, and especially clients, have no idea what they're talking about). If a feature you requested gets implemented, 99% of the time it was already on the to-do list long before you dreamed it up.